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enRomanticism and the Sense of Placehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/commons/ecology/wein/wein.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-12-01T00:00:00-05:00">December 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><h2>Romanticism and the Sense of Place</h2>
<h4>Toni Wein, California State University, Fresno</h4>
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<p>Romantics and romanticism still suffer bad press. Too often, these terms derogatorily conjure up fuzzy, if green, thinking. A similar contempt often greets environmental proclamations or ecological analyses, as debates about the Kyoto accord and the validity of global warming currently testify. To join these two fields seems almost to invite derision, which has already been amply supplied. From James Pinkerton's "Enviromanticism" to the L. A. Times blurb that Wendell Berry's <i>The Unsettling of America</i> represents "a return to the art of nurture, not as a romantic dream, but as an alternative to possible nightmare," eco-romanticism reduces to "golden hosts of daffodils."<a href="#1" name="ret1">[1]</a></p>
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<p>Why, then, risk bringing additional critical scrutiny to bear on our practices as academics? After all, critics of a liberal arts education complain of the hothouse classroom, where useless antiquarian studies yield future citizens of dreamy fragility. Yet the very premises of Romanticism and eco-criticism insist on a vibrant relevance. Far more valuable than their admittedly lush descriptions of the natural world, the percipience of Romantic writers plumbed the roots connecting "each to each."&#160; If we design courses that take advantage of the environments in which we work and live, we best heed their call. Draping the ivory tower in green may not persuade critics that the moniker is a misnomer, but it will enhance the repertoire by which we make this literature come alive. &#160;&#160;</p>
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<p>I teach in the San Joaquin valley, where rural agriculture has collided with agribusiness to produce some of the most polluted air in the United States.<a href="#2" name="ret2">[2]</a> In designing an eco-Romantics course, my eco-critical lens sighted goals both destructive and constructive. I aimed to tear down the division between the abstract and the concrete, between the textual and the material, between the environment of the classroom and that of the fields, and between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Eschewing a presentist indifference to historical specificity or a reductive one-to-one correspondence between then and now, there and here, I yearned to teach my students to "see with" Romantic eyes, in the hopes that such vision would ultimately help cleanse our own burgeoning senses of place.<a href="#3" name="ret3">[3]</a> I could have contented myself with interrogating the Romantic writers' investment in and constructions of their land. Instead, I wanted to actualize the students' experience. For that reason, I chose the concept of 'stewardship' as a key motif that would govern our readings, assignments, and discussions.</p>
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<p>In this essay, I trace the course I followed to accomplish these goals. Of necessity, that course was doubly recursive: in order for the dual historical perspective I hoped to inculcate to take root, it could not be imposed but had to emerge organically from the juxtaposition of readings and assignments; this double-tracking corresponded with pedagogical research which suggests that learning best occurs recursively.<a href="#4" name="ret4">[4]</a> In the first section, I describe how readings and assignments worked in tandem. In the second section, I give examples from student essays that illustrate the way these ideas ultimately intertwined in their imaginations and understandings.</p>
<p align="center"><b>The evolving syllabus</b></p>
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<p>I mobilized my goals from the first day, when I asked the students to study their classroom environment carefully, then to describe what they saw. In discussing their reactions and in sharing their in-class writing, what emerged was the sense that they had never before considered their classrooms as environments. Once the question had been posed to them, they began to see the kinds of messages being conveyed by the broken asbestos tiles on the ceilings, by the dirty windows fixed in place so that no fresh air could enter in, by the sheer cavernousness of the room which made the creation of a sense of community difficult. Each of these physical facts spoke volumes about their status within the university.</p>
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<p>If students suddenly realized that the physical classroom did not support their intellectual and physical well-being, they were slower to realize the way in which they were invested in fixed ideas about what constituted a classroom. In keeping with the belief that our dual perspective required a dual theatre of operations, the students received a homework assignment on the first day: a descriptive essay on their "sacred place." The directions asked them to "visit a place you love or that is meaningful to you, and describe that place in whatever way you see fit to best convey its charm, beauty, or meaningfulness to the reader." I gave them two class periods before the assignment was due, trying to allow ample time for them to make forays of some distance. I wanted the students to feel doubly immersed or invested, both in the perspective we would bring to bear and in the generous enthusiasm Romantic writers expressed for their home lands. I also suspected that the assignment would flush out each student's particular bias about the uses of land which might otherwise remain opaque to them and to me, and thus form an impediment to a new understanding of the land as sustaining a fluid interchange.</p>
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<p>As expected, some members of the class availed themselves of our proximity to the Sierra Nevadas. But they approached these places with a touristic mentality, in some cases not even leaving their cars. Thus they viewed Yosemite without tasting it on any of their other senses. A few students celebrated home gardens. One student, newly married and harried by the need to juggle relationship, work, and school, chose her living room sofa as her "sacred place," in an eerie reminiscence of Cowper's <i>The Task</i>, said by Morton Paley to be the inaugural work of Romanticism, even though it was neither a poem nor an attribution with which she was familiar.<a href="#5" name="ret5">[5]</a></p>
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<p>Strikingly, though, the exercise produced anxiety in almost every student. Here is one student's account of her reaction:</p>
<blockquote>My eyes wandered around the room as Dr. Wein told the students of English 151 that we would need to choose a sacred place and then write about it. Suddenly I became anxious about this so-called sacred place. So many questions soared through my mind but I couldn't formulate one coherent question to ask in class. I began to study the faces of my fellow classmates. Perhaps even the slightest facial movement would expose what that individual deems as sacred. Then my own questions began to surface. What do I deem as sacred? Do I even have a sacred place? Would I be able to go to my sacred place or is it too far away? I realized my mind was racing. I then decided to save my craziness for after class.</blockquote>
<p>Her initial fears express a belief that there is one right answer about what constitutes the sacred. Hence, she searches other students' faces, not in a gesture of fraternity but in a reach for an extrinsic solution. Failing to find an answer there, she begins to look internally; but the slight sense of panic about finding and/or reaching a sacred place still indicates that she places more emphasis on the place as object than on place as a site of interchange. Moreover, notions about proper behavior and proper processes in the classroom prevent her from using that space as a productive place to think: "I decided to save my craziness for after class."</p>
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<p>Fortunately, the longer she thinks, the more she restores a sense of balance:</p>
<blockquote>Hours later I still felt overwhelmed by these questions. I decided to embrace a new set of questions. How would I feel in a sacred place? Would anyone be with me in my sacred place? The second set of questions seemed less intimidating. These questions allowed me to actually imagine myself in a sacred place instead of dwelling on the fear associated with finding one. I began to remember places where I felt very content and at ease with myself.</blockquote>
<p>The student realizes that she has trapped herself in a set of "mind-forg'd manacles." Shedding that perspective, she begins to consider her own relationship to the exercise posed. As soon as she establishes that link, the process of association makes her ponder whether the sacred must also be the solitary, an excellent question given that we had spent time reading and discussing Wordsworth's "Lines written in early spring" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."</p>
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<p>Serendipity provided further means of association between the course, the campus, and events occurring around the valley on which we could capitalize.<a href="#6" name="ret6">[6]</a> I asked students to attend Fresno State's annual Volunteer Fair, an all-day event held out on the lawns between academic buildings where representatives of various community organizations came to solicit involvement. Their mission was to interview staffers and report back on the purposes of local environmental organizations. Their interchanges cleared up some misconceptions, as, for instance, the idea that Tree Fresno members militantly roamed the streets, demanding that people plant trees.<a href="#7" name="ret7">[7]</a> One student, asked by the volunteer with the San Joaquin River Parkway and Trust project whether she had ever been to our local river, suddenly realized that she didn't even know where it was, even though she had lived here her whole life. He stressed to her the necessity of maintaining an ecological balance and of respecting our dependence on our environments to provide our daily necessities without savaging nature, as had happened with the disappearance of two-foot long salmon that used to run in the San Joaquin. Most important, he shared his idea that volunteering acts as a means of educating others.<a href="#8" name="ret8">[8]</a> Her private response: "While I was talking to him, I thought that perhaps if he lived in Wordsworth's time and had writing talent, he, too, could have been a nineteenth-century poet!" Another learned that planting trees not only improves the air quality directly but indirectly, because the shade provided can help reduce the need for power to generate air-conditioning.</p>
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<p>Beyond the environmental lessons learned, this exercise provided a first opportunity for students to draw comparisons between their experiences and the texts they had been reading. With "Simon Lee" most freshly in their minds, students saw analogies, although they defined the ecology celebrated in the poem differently. One student saw "Simon Lee" as resembling the kind of "local effort to help others" represented by an organization for troubled teens called Valley Teen Ranch. A second compared the activity of environmental preservation to the motif of 'passing the torch' that occurs in the poem. In contrast, a returning student complained that "Simon Lee" advocated the notion that "our civic duty lies not with nature and the environment but with <i>each other</i>." Her more exalted sense of civic responsibility entailed a belief in the sense of continuity: "By volunteering my time or means to permanently improve my community, I not only improve everyone's quality of life, I acquire a sense of responsibility toward my community and the environment to continually improve it."</p>
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<p>Not all students were as idealistic. A visiting foreign student uncovered the corporate link to some of our larger volunteer organizations: the original land donated to the SJ River Trust came from a cement and mining corporation as part of a "plea-bargain." He noted, "the eco-friendly approach is taken only after huge fines are threatened and severe government action is on the horizon," a lesson he had learned while teaching "Environmental Coordination" for American Airlines. "I hate to take such a pessimistic tone, but from what I observed today, private corporations seem to benefit more from what we were offered than ourselves. Yet maybe I should not be such a pessimist. I do see the benefit of some privatization. With a dollar sign attached, things always seem to happen a lot faster. I wonder if the Romantics ever thought it would come to this?" His question allowed for an ongoing discussion about the class or status positions of the various writers we studied.<a href="#9" name="ret9">[9]</a></p>
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<p>The visit to the Volunteer Fair aimed to foreground the question of stewardship and to make it immediate. For those who work the land for a living, stewardship is a constant concern, even if those of us in the academy perceive the concern as taking attenuated forms. &#160;Because I knew that many of my students would have come from agricultural families, I included Wordsworth's "Michael" next. The poem spoke to them with more voices than one might hear in an urban classroom: while they bemoaned the loss of the farm, some of them also identified with Luke's desire to remain in the city. At the same time, having read Gilpin in tandem, they could see how Wordsworth tells the story from both inside and outside, that he, too, makes of the ruin a picturesque reminder of agricultural failure in the face of new economic reality.</p>
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<p>We continued to approach Romanticism as alternating between poles of aesthetics and utility with Radcliffe's <i>The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne</i>. This novel allowed for discussions about shallow and deep ecology (see esp. chapter one and the conclusion), because it defines the new gothic hero as steward to land and people.<a href="#10" name="ret10">[10]</a> Long before we witness his machinations against women, we recognize Baron Malcolm of Dunbayne as evil because he has misappropriated the rights of feudal tenure and impoverished his tenants and the land. His failed policies of tillage mirror General Tilney's hothouse cultivation of pineapples, and reveals that more than parodic dismissal links Austen's <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, which we read later in the semester, with Radcliffe. At the same time, Radcliffe's descriptions of this Gothic landscape, set not in foreign lands but in the exoticism of twelfth-century Scotland, give us a bifold view of nature as ecosystem: at once a model of unity, of "order and equilibrium" and/or a celebration of the "lowly patch."<a href="#11" name="ret11">[11]</a></p>
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<p>I paired the novel with a Sierra Club survey to "<a href="/sites/default/files/imported/pedagogies/commons/ecology/wein/ecofootprint.pdf">Measure Your Ecological Footprint</a>" (Jan./Feb. 2003) and accompanied it with a flyer from PG&amp;E to "<a href="/sites/default/files/imported/pedagogies/commons/ecology/wein/ecofootprint.pdf">Learn Where Your Energy Is Going</a>." This flyer permitted us to apply not only an environmental conscience but also a semiotic reading. It pictures an A-frame house, divided into strata and cells. At the apex, we see the back of a woman in a bathrobe, standing before a mirror drying her hair. To her right is the bedroom. Below the bedroom sits the kitchen, which is occupied by a man dressed in overalls, leaning against the refrigerator, drinking a cup of coffee. His posture reveals him to be at ease, legs crossed and one hand in his pocket; although surrounded by the trappings of labor (range, microwave, dishwasher, etc), these appliances clearly do not belong to his domain. &#160;To the further right, a young woman sits on the sofa, reading, a large dog beside her. The real demons of energy reside in the basement: furnace, water heater, washer and dryer, freezer. This representation is less than naturalistic. Admittedly, in the east, where people have basements, it would be natural to find the large units there. But the basement sits empty. Several possible readings make themselves available. Does the artist mean to imply that the only costs of labor are cultural costs, instead of the natural costs of human effort? Who supplies that human effort? What relationship exists between the organization of this fictive home and the organization of the fictional castles and abbeys in Radcliffe and Austen?</p>
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<p>Nor are interpersonal and international relations exempt from the romantic sense of place as ecosystem.&#160; For that reason, the lens accommodates issues as diverse as the abolition of slavery, women's rights, education and the franchise, technology and progress, religion and science, the supernatural, superheroes, the culture of mourning, and the ravages of war, as well as more traditional Romantic topics like the sublime and the picturesque. The Romantic literature of abolition resonated with contemporary issues about migrant farmers' status, not merely an intellectual but also a physical experience for some of my students. Questions of labor cut close to the bone when we read John Bowe's <i>New Yorker</i> essay, "Nobodies" (April 21 and 28, 2003) about the migrant agricultural population in South Florida.<a href="#12" name="ret12">[12]</a> This essay sparked students to share their own experiences as migrant farm workers. Their revelations formed a somber backdrop against which we read Ann Yearsley, Hannah More and Eaglesfield Smith, and William Cowper.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Harvesting the Results</b></p>
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<p>Not all students enjoyed the experience. Some muted complaints emerged in course evaluations that protested the blurring of traditional literary studies with what students perceived as social science.<a href="#13" name="ret13">[13]</a> However, it produced progressively complex critical thinking, even if that critical eye trained itself on our classroom procedures. Resistance to the specific idea of stewardship translated into a more nuanced sense of ownership of the literary material we read.<a href="#14" name="ret14">[14]</a></p>
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<p>I turn now to some brief examples of critical interpretation that strike out in directions different from ways in which the literature is commonly discussed by undergraduates at this university.<a href="#15" name="ret15">[15]</a> For instance, Gilpin's emphasis on composition enhanced student interpretations for their second essay. One student, writing of Blake's "The Tyger," stressed the way the poem's form made it picturesque:</p>
<blockquote>The poem's stanzas are riddled with lines in the form of questions. This technique has the reader stopping and starting abruptly and constantly. Because the reader has to stop at the question mark, he is forced to ponder the line(s) just read. In other words, instead of examining the piece of work stanza by stanza or even the poem as a whole, Blake has broken down the poem to one or two lines each for the reader to reflect [upon]. In doing this, Blake has made the questions themselves the epitome of the picturesque.</blockquote>
<p>Another student, more captivated by Kant's sublime, applied Kant's definition of the sublime's setting the mind in motion to the interchange that occurs in Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp": "More specifically, it is the descriptions of nature . . . that project this movement of the mind. . . . Coleridge could've easily just said that the smell from the bean-field was exquisite. But instead he chooses to say that the scent was 'snatched' from 'yon bean-field.' Putting it this way, we get an image, or a sense, of the scent having to move from one place to another."<a href="#16" name="ret16">[16]</a> In both these examples, we see students reassessing conventional Romantic categories in the light of eco-critical notions of interchange. Their revaluations result in a deeper appreciation of the way in which the poetry enacts an exchange between reader and text, as well as between characters and landscape.<a href="#17" name="ret17">[17]</a></p>
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<p>In keeping with my eco-Romantic emphasis, I will end where I began, with the second stage of their assignment to locate a sacred place. At the end of the semester, they returned to that same place and described it anew, reflecting as well on their earlier writing as a means of surveying the inner and outer distances they had traversed during the semester.</p>
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<p>From the student who had expressed such anguish over her ability to find a sacred place came the following reflection:</p>
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<p>Over the past few months it has become evident to me as to why this paper was assigned . . . This class is about passionate people and passionate writers; many people believe the writers of the Romantic era write about love and romance. Although the Romantics do sometimes write about these aspects, more importantly the people of this era write passionately about a variety of topics, finding a sacred place or even discovering a familiar place to be sacred enlightens one's soul. During this assignment I was forced to recognize the place that I am passionate about and where I am truly in my element. I had to ask myself: What matters to me? I became Romantic.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, I feel many of the same emotions reading "Kubla Khan" as I do when I am in my sacred place. "Kubla Khan" reflects such beauty. The positioning of the words on the page is phenomenal. Although there is talk of war in "Kubla Khan," the language used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in this poem makes me want to go and be in the midst of the nature he is describing. I am drawn to this nature much like I am drawn to my sacred place. I feel that I have a personal connection with "Kubla Khan" in relation to my sacred place. I find this line very profound: "Enfolding sunny spots of greenery." These sunny spots are being taken in. Not unlike me taking in the present moment while in my sacred place. The line suggests the sun is sacred and must be savored. Coleridge claims the caverns in his poem are 'measureless to man.' My sacred place is measureless to man as well. How could I measure how much I love being with my friends and family in my favorite place? I couldn't possibly do so. There are no means to measure the emotions I feel when I am with the people I love in a place I love. . . . The nature in this poem represents an escape from the pressures of everyday life. Even reading the poem serves&#160; as some form of escape for me. There is a certain peacefulness associated with flowing water, colorful flowers and green hills. Sometimes the human soul needs to get away from bosses, heavy traffic, and six o'clock news reports.</p>
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<p>Just like the multiple layers of meaning, philosophical and historical, that the student reports having learned to detect in the poetry, so her account contains a layered reaction. The emotional bond she establishes with the imagery of the poem and with the emotion behind the poem that she perceives or projects helps her overcome the intimidation she feels because the language and experiences are alien and difficult.</p>
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<p>Finally, the student who had initially visited Yosemite from within the safe confines of her car chose to write a poem about her second visit. Moreover, she used that poem and the essay that followed it as a means to ruminate on her own sense of expanded borders. Conscious imitation of the Preface to the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> and "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" enabled her to compose "my own lines of reflection in a much loved and familiar landscape from my past":</p>
<blockquote>To Wordsworth, composing a poem about his time spent revisiting a favorite place while on a tour would have been a natural thing. Describing his thoughts while going through the experience allows us to connect with him as an ordinary man while at the same time we are given a vivid description of his surroundings so as to almost imagine ourselves there with him. . . . In mirroring Wordsworth's thought process, I selected a common event from my life of moving cross-country. This involved moving away from my family, friends, and familiar surroundings in Tennessee to a new, unknown territory in California. . . .<br/>
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Specifically Wordsworth addresses this goal as he declares his purpose for writing poetry "principally to be: namely to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement." Even more precisely, he compares his poetry to other popular poetry of the day and expresses that the distinguishing characteristic would be "the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling." In my <i>Romantic Attempt</i>, feelings and emotions are emphasized throughout in such words as turmoil, resolve, rejected, healing, restoration, and secure. These are what drive the poem, not merely the situation of my having to move or even the details connected with being transplanted from one culture to another.</blockquote>
<p>Although she does not yet connect ideas of healing and restoration beyond her personal frame, who knows what seeds have been planted, to germinate at a future time?</p>
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<p>I began the course with the questions: "What does it mean to see with Romantic eyes? What is gained or lost?" Certainly, the desire to emulate the Romantics as a writer is an encouraging gain. In the loss column, perhaps the high Romantic stress on feeling carries an appeal so seductive to youth that it can overwhelm or counteract the accompanying cry for action. It remains to be determined whether constructing the course as a full-blown service-learning course would help restore that balance. I would hope to add some participation in an ecological or environmental outreach program as a component of the course. In addition, I might like to have guest speakers, especially from the city and county public service offices, inform and motivate the class about conditions that exist here and which need amelioration to improve the quality of life for all in the Valley. But legislating interest and involvement carries equal risks that the strategy will rebound.</p>
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<p>Nevertheless, I believed that the environment of the academy cried out for renovation as loudly as did our tarnished lands. I wanted a course that would critically examine ideas of stewardship and responsibility that simultaneously foregrounded the classroom itself as yet another romantic locale (in its role as consolatory fiction). I wanted to do more than explicate, interrogate, interpret,&#160; analyze, or understand.<a href="#18" name="ret18">[18]</a>&#160;Like the Romantic authors whom I admire, I wanted to celebrate the imagination and the abstract, to sing the virtues of the concrete and physical.<br/>
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<a href="/pedagogies/commons/ecology/wein/senseofplace.html">[Go to SYLLABUS]</a></p>
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<h4 align="center">Notes</h4>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="1"> </a><b>[1]</b> See James Pinkerton, "Enviromanticism: the poetry of nature as a political force," <i>Foreign Affairs</i>, May-June 1997 v76 n3 p2(6). Expanded Academic ASAP. &lt;<a href="http://web5.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/477/324/61556576w5">http://web5.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/<br/>
infomark/477/324/61556576w5</a>&gt; [<a href="#ret1">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="2"> </a><b>[2]</b> Many sources that record pollution scores exist on the Internet. For my region, I checked <a href="http://www.valleyairquality.com/">http://www.valleyairquality.com/</a>; <a href="http://www.nrdc.org/air/pollution/bt/2840.asp">http://www.nrdc.org/air/pollution/bt/2840.asp</a>; <a href="http://www.1000friendsoffresno.org/airquality.html">http://www.1000friendsoffresno.org/airquality.html</a>; and <a href="http://www.valleyair.org/aqinfo/forecast.htm">www.valleyair.org/aqinfo/forecast.htm</a>. According to the American Lung Association State of the Air 2004, Fresno-Madera counties ranked second in the nation for "<b>Metropolitan Areas Most Polluted by Short-term Particle Pollution (24-Hour PM<sub>2.5</sub>)</b>," after the Los Angeles Basin; they ranked second in "<b>Metropolitan Areas with the Worst Ozone Air Pollution."</b> This last statistic should be measured against our ranking as fourth-worst in 2000 and 2001. [<a href="#ret2">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="3"> </a><b>[3]</b> Cf. Phillip Barrish, "Critical Presentism." Romanticism and Contemporary Culture. Praxis Series. Romantic Circles. 4 April 2006. &lt;<a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/contemporary/barrish/barrish.html">http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/contemporary<br/>
/barrish/barrish.html</a>&gt;. [<a href="#ret3">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="4"> </a><b>[4]</b> "REPETITION AIDS LEARNING IN CHILDREN EXPOSED TO ALCOHOL PRE-BIRTH." <i>Health Behavior News Service</i>. Ed. Ira R. Allen Center. June 17, 2002. Center for the Advancement of Health Affairs. 13 October, 2004. <a href="http://www.hbns.org/newsrelease/learning6-17-02.cfm">http://www.hbns.org/newsrelease/learning6-17-02.cfm</a>; Poldrack, Russell A. and John D. E. Gabrieli. "Characterizing the Neural Mechanisms of skill learning and repetition priming." <i>Brain</i> 124 (2001): 67-82. I have given a fuller explanation of this mechanism in "Mapping the Novel," in <i>Academic Exchange Quarterly</i>, Spring 2005, Volume 9, Issue 1 (<b><a href="http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/">ISSN 1096-1453</a></b><br/>
<a href="http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/spr2005.htm">http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/spr2005.htm</a>). [<a href="#ret4">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="5"> </a><b>[5]</b> Dr. Paley made this point repeatedly as he guided my preparation for my qualifying oral exams at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. [<a href="#ret5">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="6"> </a><b>[6]</b> Gilpin's writings on the picturesque furnished a lesson on situational ethics that dovetailed with the first Sierra Conference, a full day public seminar focusing on air, water and land issues affecting our Sierra Nevadas, held on campus. [<a href="#ret6">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="7"> </a><b>[7]</b> Visit &lt;<a href="http://www.treefresno.org">http://www.treefresno.org</a>&gt;. [<a href="#ret7">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="8" id="8"> </a><b>[8]</b> Visit &lt;<a href="http://www.riverparkway.org">http://www.riverparkway.org</a>&gt;. [<a href="#ret8">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="9" id="9"> </a><b>[9]</b> By introducing reviews, letters, and journals, especially when we came to Keats, the class could see that class issues informed estimations of Romantic work in their own day. [<a href="#ret9">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="10" id="10"> </a><b>[10]</b> See &lt;<a href="http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/radcliffe/athlin/athlin.html">http://digital.library.upenn.edu/<br/>
women/radcliffe/athlin/athlin.html</a>&gt;. [<a href="#ret10">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="11" id="11"> </a><b>[11]</b> For a discussion of Radcliffe from this perspective, see Wein, <i>British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824</i> (Palgrave, 2002), esp. 100-09. I take the definition of eco-systems from William L. Howarth, "Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands." <i>New Literary History</i>, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Summer, 1999), pp. 509-539. [<a href="#ret11">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="12" id="12"> </a><b>[12]</b>&#160; Expanded Academic ASAP. <i>The NewYorker</i>. April 21 and 28, 2003. Article no. 298. [<a href="#ret12">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="13" id="13"> </a><b>[13]</b> Of course, such a limited conception of what constitutes the classroom, complete with margins beyond which topics may stray, reinforces the value of an eco-critical approach, because it helps students to re-examine their own assumptions. I do think I was remiss, though, in not building some reflective exercise into the course mid-semester that would have permitted us to air those concerns and to use them as yet another teaching opportunity. I would rectify that oversight in future courses. [<a href="#ret13">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="14" id="14"> </a><b>[14]</b> I tried to encourage that sense of ownership in the construction of essay and homework assignments, and by the way I framed the essay portion of their final exam, an open-book question. See <a href="/pedagogies/commons/ecology/wein/openbook.html">attached exam</a>. [<a href="#ret14">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="15" id="15"> </a><b>[15]</b> See the <a href="/pedagogies/commons/ecology/wein/diressay.html">specific directions</a> students received when crafting their first essay. [<a href="#ret15">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="16" id="16"> </a><b>[16]</b> See a <a href="/pedagogies/commons/ecology/wein/topicbibliog.html">sample student proposal and annotated bibliography</a> for the second research essay. [<a href="#ret16">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="17" id="17"> </a><b>[17]</b> See a <a href="/pedagogies/commons/ecology/wein/summidyll.html">sample essay</a>. [<a href="#ret17">BACK</a>]</p>
<p><a name="18" id="18"> </a><b>[18]</b> As eco-criticism takes on an increasingly institutional shape, much self-reflexive discussion about its&#160; nature and methods has arisen. Most comments so far have restricted themselves to the traditional academic verbs I enumerate. See, for example <i>ASLE Digest</i>, Vol. 2 No. 41, February 10, 2005. [<a href="#ret18">BACK</a>]</p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31530">Pedagogies</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/ecology/index.html">Romanticism, Ecology and Pedagogy</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/wein-toni">Wein, Toni</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/samuel-taylor-coleridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Samuel Taylor Coleridge</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/991" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Gilpin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1137" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the sublime</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/ann-radcliffe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ann Radcliffe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1689" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">abolition</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3464" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">shallow and deep ecology</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3465" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">volunteerism</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/997" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">picturesque</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/wendell-berry" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wendell Berry</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/james-pinkerton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Pinkerton</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-cowper" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Cowper</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/hannah-more" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hannah More</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/morton-d-paley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Morton D. Paley</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/kyoto" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kyoto</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/california" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">California</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/scotland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scotland</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-naturalfeature-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NaturalFeature:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/san-joaquin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">San Joaquin</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/natural-feature/san-joaquin-valley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">San Joaquin valley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/sierra-nevadas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sierra Nevadas</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:45:30 +0000rc-admin22078 at http://www.rc.umd.eduTeaching Race and Racial Difference in Romantic Reformist Fictionhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2008-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2008</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><h2>Teaching Race and Racial Difference in Romantic Reformist Fiction</h2>
<h4>A. A. Markley, Penn State University Brandywine</h4>
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<p>During the 1790s and the early years of the nineteenth century, a wide range of writers began to experiment with the conventions of the popular novel&#8212;the novel of sensibility, the picaresque narrative, the domestic novel, and the gothic novel, among others&#8212;in an attempt to open the eyes of the reading public to the possibilities of political and social reform. Many such writers were labeled by conservatives as "Jacobins," a misnomer borrowed from a political group in France, and one that has been preserved by critics in the centuries since. Modern critics have tended to limit the term "Jacobin" to a small circle of writers: Robert Bage, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Wollstonecraft.<a name="1b" id="1b"> </a><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#1">[1]</a> Nevertheless, there were many others at work during these years who, with varying degrees of radicalism, shared the conviction that the novel could be used to convert the opinions of the reading public, including such figures as Maria Edgeworth, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Anna Maria Mackenzie, Amelia Opie, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, John Thelwall, and Helen Maria Williams.</p>
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<p>Although those labeled as Jacobins never became a unified political party espousing one particular doctrine of political change, many authors who sought to disseminate a reformist agenda through their writings did share certain ideals, including 1) a commitment to the rights of the individual that included an emphasis on equality between men and women and an emerging awareness of the disenfranchisement of the lower classes and racial others, 2) a devotion to the Enlightenment idea that reason could and must triumph over tradition through political and social reform,<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#2">[2]</a><a name="2b" id="2b"> </a> and 3) a conviction that reform could best be achieved by working to alter the opinions of the individual. This group of reformist writers addressed a variety of political and social issues in the revolutionary decade, including advocating for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the rights of women, resolution of the Jewish question through tolerance, the leveling of the class system, and the enfranchisement of such groups as foreigners, the poor, and the dispossessed in Britain. I have found that these reformists' novels offer students an opportunity to study the political and social controversies of a period in which the rights of the individual and the subjection of the disenfranchised were first widely debated in English fiction. In emphasizing questions of social equity, many of these novels unsettle questions pertaining to gender, class, and race, and thus offer a wealth of opportunities for productive classroom discussions on these topics. However, with the exception of Godwin's <em>Caleb Williams</em> and Wollstonecraft's <em>The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria,</em> most of these works continue to be forgotten today. Few are regularly included in courses on Romantic literature or on the eighteenth-century novel, although works by Bage, Hays, Inchbald, and Smith, among others, are gradually beginning to
find their way into course syllabi.</p>
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<p>My comments here are based on my experiences teaching a variety of reformist works in senior-level courses and seminars for English majors on the eighteenth-century novel, on the literature of the Romantic period, and on the literature of the 1790s more specifically. These works are perhaps most appropriate for students who have some background in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, but I have also introduced them to students without such backgrounds by beginning with introductory readings on the political atmosphere of the 1790s, including selections from Burke and Paine, and Godwin and Wollstonecraft. While English majors <em>are</em> concerned about their sufficient exposure to canonical texts, I have found that many of them are very enthusiastic about the opportunity to participate in new research on lesser-known and out-of-print works from the Romantic period and that they welcome assignments that introduce them to research methods involving primary research on such texts. Spade work on long-forgotten texts can be very exciting, as one never knows exactly what will be uncovered; here undergraduates can really feel the thrill of primary research.</p>
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<p>In this essay I describe assignments and topics pertaining to Romantic-period reformist texts that treat issues of race and racial difference in particular, and I propose a design for a semester-length course devoted to this topic, the syllabus for which can be found below. Particular units of this course might be easily adapted for more general introductions to Romantic literature or to the British novel, both at the upper-level undergraduate and at graduate levels. The dramatic influx of political content into both reformist and conservative novels of the 1790s and early 1800s laid the groundwork for the development of the novel of social consciousness that would become such a critical component of the genre in the nineteenth century. This history also makes these works ideal for courses on the novel that may include later works by such socially conscious figures as Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Eliot, or Hardy.</p>
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<p>In my experience, the novels of the 1790s initiate dynamic learning experiences in the classroom because students readily recognize the degree to which the controversies they address and the values they profess link them to debates about civil rights that have reached well into our own time. It is true that students today often find Romantic-period novels foreign and far-removed from the circumstances of their own lives. In order to draw them into the material and to get them reading and thinking seriously about these texts, it helps to focus on broad themes that place these works in a context that students recognize as relevant to their own experience. Most students recognize issues of race and racial difference as charged and often pressing issues in their own life experiences, and I have found that they tend to become more engaged and invested in our discussions when I ask them to read reformist novels with a particular eye towards how race and racism are encoded within the works and how these authors begin to raise questions about assumptions formed on the basis of racial difference. Such an approach has great pedagogical value, for as students examine how race and racism is depicted and combated in these works, they are better able to apply such ethical considerations to situations in their own immediate and personal contexts. Moreover, as they come to recognize that race and racism function differently at different times, they may come to realize that race and racism have histories.</p>
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<p>Although the racial other&#8212;the African or Jewish character, for example&#8212;appears only occasionally in British literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I have had great success in asking students to analyze, assess, and compare stereotypical treatments of these races in more conservative eighteenth-century texts with the ways these representations begin to be altered by reformist writers who in many cases were working to shape an early argument for the humane treatment of all human beings. Equal civil rights for British citizens of all races would not come to pass for many more generations, but early glimmers of an emerging social conscience in the late eighteenth century would nevertheless contribute significantly to the first stages of that movement. By focusing on issues of race, students are able to recognize that these long-forgotten texts have a direct relationship to cultural problems and issues that continue to challenge us today.</p>
<p align="center">&#160;</p>
<p><strong><em>Background</em></strong> <strong><em>Readings</em></strong> <strong><em>on Slavery and Abolition</em></strong></p>
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<p>I suggest beginning a course on the treatment of race in Romantic-period fiction with a reading of Aphra Behn's <em>Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave</em> (1688), a text Catherine Gallagher has called "the first literary work in English to grasp the global interactions of the modern world,"<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#3">[3]</a><a name="3b" id="3b"> </a> and one to which late-eighteenth-century treatments on race often allude. Gallagher's Bedford Cultural Edition of <em>Oroonoko</em> provides supplementary materials that offer students a wealth of background on race and blackness excerpted from such writers as Montaigne, Jonson, Dryden, Steele, Addison, and Defoe, and on the nature of the slave trade in West Africa, the Caribbean, and Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This edition also excerpts Thomas Southerne's 1695 dramatic adaptation of <em>Oroonoko</em> as well as a 1760 adaptation of Southerne's play that demonstrates how effectively the Royal Prince's story was adapted to the abolitionist cause in the eighteenth century. After we discuss <em>Oroonoko</em> as a literary work, I have had students study these supplementary works and prepare class presentations on them to instruct their peers on a wide variety of these related issues and topics.</p>
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<p>The popular dramatizations of <em>Oroonoko</em> provide a perfect segue into a study of abolitionist poetry of the late eighteenth century. The range of selections provided in the section entitled "Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Abolition in Britain" in Anne K. Mellor's and Richard E. Matlak's <em>British Literature 1780-1830</em> provide a perfect introduction to these works; other anthologies of British literature such as those published by Longman and Broadview Press contain many of the same selections. In the Mellor/Matlak anthology, excerpts from Lord Mansfield's 1772 judgment on the rights of slaves, as well as from abolitionist writings by Ottobah Cugoano, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Clarkson provide useful background for our work on such poems as William Cowper's "Pity for Poor Africans" (1788), with its parable exposing those who decry slavery without recognizing their own complicity in supporting a slave-driven economy, and Amelia Opie's "The Black Man's Lament, or How to Make Sugar" (1826), in which a slave speaker explains in vivid terms why his sufferings outweigh those of the laborer in Britain.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#4">[4]</a><a name="4b" id="4b"> </a></p>
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<p>Understandably, I have found that my students are most profoundly affected by our work with actual slave narratives from the period, such as <em>The History of Mary Prince</em> (1831) and selections from Olaudah Equiano's <em>The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano</em> (1789), both of which are commonly excerpted in anthologies of British literature. Angelo Costanzo's 2004 Broadview edition of Equiano's autobiography is particularly useful for its supplementary materials on the first Abolition Movement. Prince's and Equiano's narratives work well together because each describes a distinctly different experience of slavery. Prince's account of the abuses she suffers from a series of cruel owners is more viscerally disturbing for its graphic illustration of the particular vulnerability of slave women. Equiano's narrative, on the other hand, raises thought-provoking issues relating to its influence on late eighteenth-century readers. Students are interested to learn that Equiano embarked on one of the earliest book tours when his autobiography was published in order to capitalize on the <em>Narrative</em> 's potential contribution to the Abolition Movement.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#5">[5]</a><a name="5b" id="5b"> </a> In addition, the controversy over the actual place of Equiano's birth&#8212;Africa versus South Carolina&#8212;plagued Equiano after the <em>Narrative</em> appeared and continues amongst critics today, a debate that can spark a provocative class discussion on what effect this question does or should have on how we assess Equiano's life story today.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#6">[6]</a><a name="6b" id="6b"> </a></p>
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<p class="descbig"><strong>The African in England and in the Reformist Novel</strong></p>
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<p>I propose following the study of actual slave narratives by turning to William Earle, Jr.'s <em>Obi; or, The History of Three-fingered Jack,</em> an account of escaped slave named Jack Mansong, famous for his practice of "obi" or "obeah," a West African brand of sorcery or voodoo, and for his role as leader of a band of robbers in the early 1780s.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#7">[7]</a><a name="7b" id="7b"> </a> Earle's novel is available in a Broadview edition edited by Srinivas Aravamudan that includes the text of James Fawcett's pantomime of Mansong's story; the pantomime and an 1820s-era melodrama can also be accessed in the August 2002 Romantic Circles Praxis Volume dedicated to the history of <em>Obi.</em> Interestingly, Fawcett's pantomime became a sensation on the London stage in the summer of 1800 and remained popular for decades afterwards. While the success of Fawcett's pantomime was likely due to Jack's superhuman portrayal and the violence of his rebellious life and of his capture, the story of <em>Obi</em> played an important role in opening Londoners' eyes to many of the realities of slave life in the West Indies and to the injustice of slavery as an institution. Charles Rzepka has pointed out that by the 1820s <em>Obi</em> became an even more powerful vehicle for English abolitionists, when William Murray converted the pantomime into a melodrama and gave Jack a speaking role that allowed him to speak out against the atrocities of the capture of Africans and of their treatment by planters in the West Indian colonies.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#8">[8]</a><a name="8b" id="8b"> </a> As in the case of Southerne's dramatization of Behn's <em>Oroonoko,</em> teaching the pantomime and melodrama of <em>Obi</em> alongside Earle's novel allows students to analyze how specific aspects of the novel were translated into affecting dramatic scenes and illustrates exactly how abolitionists tended to utilize popular venues of
contemporary entertainment to convert their audiences to their cause. <em>Obi</em> also provides a link from our work on abolitionist poetry and slave narratives to a particular focus on reformist fiction.</p>
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<p>In turning to the topic of race in Romantic-period fiction, I recommend beginning with either Anna Maria Mackenzie's <em>Slavery: Or, The Times</em> (1792) or Amelia Opie's <em>Adeline Mowbray</em> (1804). Certainly Opie's novel, which is available in paperback editions edited by Miriam Wallace and by Shelley King and John B. Peirce is easier to access. Mackenzie's <em>Slavery,</em> by contrast, is a long-forgotten work available today only on Thomson Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database (ECCO), and so is limited to courses on university campuses that subscribe to this database, or to those who are willing to provide students with photocopies of particular chapters of the novel. <em>Slavery</em> is a quirky novel, and Mackenzie's attempts to simulate the vernacular of particular characters make it harder for students to follow at times; nevertheless I have found it to be a very effective text for provoking dynamic classroom discussions on its depiction of slavery and its abolitionist bent.</p>
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<p>Mackenzie's primary goal in her novel lay in exposing the evils of the slave trade and the mechanisms by which it was being perpetuated, and she does so by recasting the Rousseauan child of nature in her hero Adolphus, a young African prince who embodies the qualities of the hypersensitive man of feeling to the fullest degree.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#9">[9]</a><a name="9b" id="9b"> </a> As the epistolary novel opens, the African chief Zimza of Tonouwah puts his son Adolphus under the guardianship of a friend in London so that the boy can be given an English education. Mackenzie may have based the character of Adolphus and his experiences in England on any of a number of contemporary accounts of African princes who were brought to Europe to be educated, many of whom were sold into slavery despite their parents' trust in the white traders and sailors who promised them safe passage.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#10">[10]</a><a name="10b" id="10b"> </a> In 1749, for example, the son of a West African king and a friend were sold into slavery by their ship's captain rather than being carried to England as promised. After their ransom by the British government, the young men enjoyed celebrity in London and were greeted by public applause when they attended a Covent Garden revival of Southerne's <em>Oroonoko.</em><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#11">[11]</a><a name="11b" id="11b"> </a> Students are pleased to recognize the symbolic importance of <em>Oroonoko</em> when Mackenzie's hero also attends a revival of the play.</p>
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<p>Adolphus's position as an innocent raised in a simpler, yet in many ways more civilized, culture allows him to make incisive observations on contemporary and fashionable life in Britain and its colonies throughout the novel. As soon as he arrives in England, Adolphus is shocked to witness a press-gang force young men into service, and he asks how this practice differs from the slave trade. Adolphus is also shocked by the social conventions of the <em>haut ton.</em> He cannot understand the devotion of the upper-class English to their nightly gambling routs, nor the cold reserve of young English women who feign a lack of interest in the men whose attentions they desire. By including such attacks of high society in contemporary Britain, Mackenzie extends her critique of slavery into a broader critique of the European class system. Ultimately, by placing an innocent colonial spectator in cosmopolitan England, she is able to expand what might have been simply a fictionalized abolitionist tract into a wide-ranging assessment of the characteristics of a "civilized" world that allows for and even nurtures slavery, enforced military service, the subjection of women, and inheritance fraud, among many other social evils of the day.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#12">[12]</a><a name="12b" id="12b"> </a></p>
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<p>Mackenzie's particular brand of social satire owes much to Voltaire's <em>L'Ing&#233;nu</em> (1767), and teachers who are interested in devoting class time to <em>Slavery</em> might consider beginning by having students read Voltaire's satire. Alternatively, a study of <em>Slavery</em> in the classroom might be usefully followed by either Elizabeth Inchbald's <em>Nature and Art</em> (1796) or Robert Bage's <em>Hermsprong; or Man As He Is Not</em> (1796), both of which follow Mackenzie in adapting Voltaire's <em>ing&#233;nu</em> as a critic of social mores and behaviors in 1790s Britain.</p>
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<p>As an alternative to <em>Slavery,</em> Amelia Opie's <em>Adeline Mowbray</em> also offers a rare view of an African character's experience of late eighteenth-century England. Although the African is often stereotyped during this period as the unflaggingly faithful servant to a white individual or family, Opie employs and also moves beyond the stereotype in her characterization of her heroine Adeline's companion, Savanna. Savanna is introduced in the novel when the destitute Adeline decides to sell a valuable veil at one third of its value in order to buy a pineapple as a treat for her dying lover Glenmurray. On the way to the fruitmonger's, Adeline encounters a family of former slaves in distress. Although he is deathly ill, the father, William, is being arrested and taken to debtor's prison for a debt of six pounds. Adeline deliberates on the situation until she hears the creditor make a racial slur regarding William and his wife Savanna. Because this particular case of brutality is compounded by racial prejudice, Adeline cannot resist the inclination to assist the family, despite the fact that alleviating their debt will deprive her beloved Glenmurray of perhaps his last pleasure. Students generally agree that the significance of this particular episode lies in Opie's demonstration to her readers that her heroine does not initially recognize racial difference until it is drawn to her attention.</p>
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<p>After this episode the grateful Savanna and her son "Tawny Boy" become devoted companions and servants to Adeline, enduring poverty alongside her. The embodiment of perfect loyalty, Savanna stays by Adeline's side for the rest of Adeline's life, nursing her through illness, helping her eke out a meager living, and going so far as to protect Adeline when she makes an unfortunate marriage to the deceitful Charles Berrendale. In the final lines of the novel the dying Adeline rests her head not on her mother's, but on Savanna's bosom.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#13">[13]</a><a name="13b" id="13b"> </a> The subtitle of <em>Adeline Mowbray,</em> "The Mother and Daughter," clearly indicates the emphasis Opie wished to place on Adeline's troubled relationship with her mother Editha. After raising Adeline to subscribe to a system of modern philosophical convictions that disdains the institution of marriage, Editha values her status in society too highly to support Adeline when Adeline acts on those convictions and chooses not to marry her lover Glenmurray. In addition, Editha further alienates Adeline by repeatedly exhibiting a selfish preference for her dissolute husband over her own daughter. In the final analysis, it is highly significant that it is the nurturing Savanna who provides Adeline with the care and protection of a true mother.</p>
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<p>Students might be asked why Opie may have chosen to depict an African character in a period in which so few such characters appear in the British novel. As a woman and as an escaped slave who is sold back into slavery when she returns to Jamaica, Savanna represents perhaps the most extreme example of the dispossessed in contemporary British culture. Her status as an outcast and as the survivor of literal enslavement make her an example with which the reader is asked to compare Adeline's own situation as a woman and a social outcast. Here critical essays on the novel can be very helpful. Carol Howard, for example, argues that <em>Adeline Mowbray</em> "establishes an idealized and nostalgic relationship of what might best be called <em>fealty"</em> between Adeline and Savanna, providing a "melioristic, rather than revolutionary, solution both to the 'problem' of slavery and the problems of marriage."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#14">[14]</a><a name="14b" id="14b"> </a> Going one step farther, Roxanne Eberle suggests that "the escaped black slave can serve as an empowering model for the psychologically shackled white British woman" because she has "reclaimed herself from an economic and legal system which had considered her 'chattel.'"<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#15">[15</a>]<a name="15b" id="15b"> </a> In Eberle's view Opie offers the resistance of the African woman in England as inspiration to the women of Britain.</p>
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<p>Howard's and Eberle's analyses of <em>Adeline Mowbray</em> can initiate a valuable discussion concerning whether or not the novel should be read as a melioristic approach to the "'problem' of slavery and the problems of marriage" or as a more radical attempt to encourage women readers to recognize parallels between their status and that of African slaves. Of course opinions will be varied, but most undergraduates agree that it is significant that, at the very least, Opie asks her readers to consider Savanna's humanity and her rights as a human being, just as she asks her readers to consider Adeline's rights as a British woman. Would it be premature to assume that Opie's goal may have been to address such prejudice as a first step towards converting her readers' attitudes towards the treatment of both Africans and women in contemporary society? The question is of course debatable, but from this particular perspective <em>Adeline Mowbray</em> may be interpreted as a more revolutionary and more profoundly provocative text than it has been to date; indeed, many critics have traditionally and reductively consigned it to the category of anti-Jacobin literature due to its complex exploration of the limitations of Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's philosophies. By attending to its handling of the issues of women's position and especially of the black woman's plight, we can resituate this novel as importantly reformist.</p>
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<p class="descbig"><strong>The Creole Stereotype in the Hands of Reformists</strong></p>
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<p>Eighteenth-century literary treatments of the West Indian Creole tend to offer more insight into contemporary attitudes towards slavery and abolition than representations of African slaves themselves. In the eighteenth century the term "Creole" was applied broadly to whites who had settled in the West Indies from a variety of European countries, including England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Despite the fact that British consumers constantly demanded West Indian exports in ever-increasing quantities, depictions of Creoles in the British novel often indicate a distinct discomfort with perceived differences in personality and manners between the British at home and those who lived abroad. In many cases an uneasiness about the social position of Creoles is overshadowed by a deeper anxiety concerning miscegenation.</p>
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<p>Richard Cumberland's play <em>The West Indian</em> (1771) contains one of the most influential portraits of a Creole in the late eighteenth century, although it is an unusually benign one. The play provides a good starting-point for a discussion of the stereotype, and although Cumberland's work has not been republished in an affordable classroom edition, facsimiles of early editions are available on ECCO and in a 6-volume Garland edition edited by Roberta Borkat. In <em>The West Indian,</em> Cumberland's good-hearted hero "Belcour" arrives in London with a host of slaves carrying his many trunks of belongings. An English friend characterizes Belcour as the product of "an education not of the strictest kind," and allows that "strong animal spirits, are apt sometimes to betray him into youthful irregularities," but he also attests to Belcour's unusual candour and his "uncommon benevolence."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#16">[16]</a><a name="16b" id="16b"> </a> Despite his good heart, however, Belcour immediately incites a riot when he arrives in London and treats the boatmen on the docks as if they were his slaves.</p>
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<p>It is not surprising that Belcour's New World upbringing has not prepared him for life in England, and his experiences there quickly reveal him to be far too na&#239;ve for sophisticated Londoners. Belcour himself is quick to blame the "irregularities" of his character on the region of his birth (I, 40; 77). He explains his sudden obsession with the beautiful Louisa Dudley, for example, by stating that "if this is folly in me, you must rail at Nature: you must chide the sun, that was vertical at my birth, and would not wink upon my nakedness, but swaddled me in the broadest, hottest glare of his meridian beams" (I, 33). Despite a precipitous nature, Belcour's "heart beaming with benevolence" and "animated nature, fallible indeed, but not incorrigible" (I, 77) ultimately win him Louisa's love, as well as the affection of the other English characters.</p>
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<p>Reformist fictions of the 1790s include more complex and more provocative depictions of the Creole stereotype. One of the best examples can be found in Charlotte Smith's "The Story of Henrietta," in the second volume of <em>The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer</em> (1800), recently republished in volume XI of Pickering and Chatto's <em>The Works of Charlotte Smith.</em> Smith takes her reader into the heart of plantation life in Jamaica and into the midst of an uprising of "maroons," a term derived from the French <em>marron,</em> meaning "feral," and applied to bands of fugitives from slavery and their descendants in the West Indies. Smith places her beleaguered heroine Henrietta Maynard in a highly Gothic setting, albeit one adapted to contemporary Jamaica, when Henrietta is faced with "a father possessing unlimited power, and surrounded by slaves; in a remote house, of an island, many parts of which are liable to the attacks of savages driven to desperation, and thirsting for the blood of any who resembled even in colour their hereditary oppressors."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#17">[17]</a><a name="17b" id="17b"> </a> Henrietta's father embodies the worst possible stereotype of the cruel Jamaican landowner. Interestingly, Smith does not shrink from describing Henrietta's shock at discovering that several of the mulatto servants in her father's household are his own daughters and thus her half-sisters. When her father attempts to force Henrietta to marry a man he has chosen for her, her position is compared to that of her father's slaves when one of the slaves tells her that "master give him you, Miss, and all this great rich estates, and pens and all" (II, 63). As Opie would do a few years later in <em>Adeline Mowbray,</em> here Smith makes the parallel between the subjection of women and that of West Indian slaves perfectly clear.</p>
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<p>One of the most extensive treatments of turn-of-the-century life in the West Indies can be found in John Thelwall's little-known novel <em>The Daughter of Adoption,</em> published in 1801 under the pseudonym of "John Beaufort." Although Thelwall's novel is long out of print and is currently available only on microfiche in Sheffield Hallam University's Corvey Project, the novel includes unusually complex treatments of race and slavery and thus has a great deal to offer in courses addressing these topics. Like Mackenzie's <em>Slavery,</em> this novel well repays the trouble of providing students with a few photocopied excerpts. In the novel the young hero, Henry Montfort, travels to his father's estate in St Domingo, where he finds that Creoles exhibit the worst kinds of social behaviors that he encountered at home in England. He is horrified by the Creoles' treatment of their slaves, and particularly by their nonchalance about disciplining the slaves with brutal forms of corporal punishment. When he raises questions about the issue, Henry is called an <em>ami des noirs,</em> a name alluding to a contemporary abolitionist society in France. "Where is the elysian scene that vice and misery will not pervade," Henry asks with great passion, while enjoying a magnificent West Indian landscape, "when impious man, trampling the sacred rights of nature in the dust, erects the arbitrary distinctions of races and of colours; and makes the vulgar accidents of climate&#8212;the tints and traits of feature imparted by a too fervid sun, the shallow pretexts for trafficking in human gore, and bending the necks of a large proportion of the human race under the iron yoke of slavery?"<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#18">[18]</a><a name="18b" id="18b"> </a> Though expressed in florid language, Henry's statement is a remarkably early demonstration of the arbitrariness and insignificance of skin color in relation to human worth.</p>
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<p>Despite his clear abolitionist agenda, Thelwall's treatment of race in <em>The Daughter of Adoption</em> is complicated in ways that can be troubling to students today. The novel's villain, for example, is Lucius Moroon, a wealthy planter whose very name embodies racial tensions of the West Indies; the bloody Maroon War of 1795-1796 would have been a recent memory for Thelwall's readers in 1801. Moroon's dissipated character is blamed on the fact that he was raised by mulattoes. Here contemporary anxiety about the potential threat of miscegenation is brought to the fore, as Thelwall characterizes mulattoes as "a set of people in whose composition vices the most atrocious, and virtues the most rare and disinterested, are frequently so confused and blended, that it is sometimes equally difficult to condemn with sufficient abhorrence, or applaud them with sufficient ardour" (II, 143).</p>
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<p>When Thelwall introduces the Creole heroine Seraphina, he is careful to describe her in a way that makes her racial heritage unclear: her eyes are "too dark for hazel," her brown hair is "glossed with a tint of orient," and the shade of her skin is notably neglected (I, 320). Described as an unusually intelligent and free-thinking young woman, Seraphina becomes the most vocal mouthpiece for the novel's progressive ideals. It may be that Seraphina's status as a Creole made Thelwall more comfortable in allowing her relationship with Henry to become a sexual one virtually from the start. On their voyage to England immediately after the insurrection, Seraphina becomes pregnant, but the couple does not marry for fear that Henry's father will disinherit him. Here Thelwall recasts the reformist heroines of such bold feminists as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays; Seraphina lives without shame because she considers herself married to Henry in her heart. Not surprisingly, however, once she arrives in England Seraphina's modern ideas on love and marriage serve only to confirm suspicions about West Indian morals. In references made to her by English characters the term "Creole" is used with a sharp racist edge.</p>
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<p>Although <em>The Daughter of Adoption</em> promotes the radical reformist idea that marriage is merely a ceremony and has no bearing on the essential purity of the heart, Henry and Seraphina do marry at the novel's conclusion. The actual ceremony does not take place, however, until Seraphina is revealed to be the natural child of Henry's father Percival Montfort, as is, surprisingly enough, Lucius Moroon. After a few chapters in which the reader is left to worry that incest has been committed, Henry is conveniently proven to be Montfort's adopted son. Thus on the final pages of the novel Thelwall diffuses any tension stemming from the uncertainty of Seraphina's background by revealing her to be a purely white English girl after all. Michael Scrivener has observed that despite the novel's abolitionist agenda, its conclusion "only mildly disrupts the racist categories, because the utopian community formed around Seraphina and Henry in north Yorkshire is all-white and socially homogenous."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#19">[19]</a><a name="19b" id="19b"> </a> It is likely that students will agree that establishing Seraphina's racial status as purely white at the end of the novel undercuts the force of the novel's social criticism, and some may assume that Thelwall felt the necessity of capitulating to the demands of contemporary literary convention in order to please his readers. Nevertheless, students should also be asked to consider the import of the fact that despite the novel's ending, Thelwall has required his reader to rethink a variety of common assumptions about race and racial stereotypes throughout the greater part of his narrative.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#20">[20]</a><a name="20b" id="20b"> </a></p>
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<p>To conclude a unit on the Creole stereotype, teachers might consider texts that seem to advocate less radical and even melioristic responses of slavery as contrasts to such overtly anti-slavery texts as "The Story of Henrietta" and <em>The Daughter of Adoption.</em> Maria Edgeworth's short story, "The Grateful Negro," provides a perfect example of a melioristic treatment of slavery that will provoke a wide range of strong student opinions. Included in her <em>Popular Tales</em> of 1804, "The Grateful Negro" is available in volume XII of Pickering and Chatto's <em>The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth</em> and in the Mellor-Matlak anthology. In this tale Edgeworth introduces a slave-owner in Jamaica, Mr. Jefferies, who epitomizes the worst of the cruel slave-owner stereotype, in contrast to his neighbor, Mr. Edwards, a planter who "wished that there was no such thing as slavery in the world," but who was also "convinced, by the arguments of those who have the best means of obtaining information, that the sudden emancipation of the negroes would rather encrease than diminish their miseries."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#21">[21]</a><a name="21b" id="21b"> </a> Mr. Edwards "adopted those plans, for the amelioration of the state of the slaves, which appeared to him the most likely to succeed without producing any violent agitation, or revolution" (49-50). Edwards assigns his slaves reasonable daily tasks and allows them free time to pursue their own interests. If they choose to perform additional work for their master, they are paid wages. When Jefferies is forced by his debts to sell his slave Caesar, and thus separate Caesar from his beloved Clara, Edwards steps in and buys both Caesar and Clara so that the two may stay together and marry. This vision of ameliorated slavery is complicated, however, by the story's focus on a violent slave rebellion, instances of which were often cited by anti-abolitionists as justification for keeping
slaves in submission. Caesar's friend, Hector, is driven to a frenzy by the local obeah woman Esther into plotting a bloody attack on all of the whites in the area. When Caesar is unable to sway Hector or Esther in their plans for the insurrection, he gives up his own life to warn Edwards and thus saves his master from the attack.</p>
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<p>Modern critics insist that "The Grateful Negro" cannot be classed alongside abolitionist texts and that it must be more accurately understood as an exploration of ethical aspects of labor and of abuses that can lead to violent rebellion.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#22">[22]</a><a name="22b" id="22b"> </a> It is true that the story builds upon contemporary ameliorative arguments for the reform of slavery and for the humane treatment of slaves, although it should be acknowledged that such arguments were usually made by those who wished to see slavery abolished eventually. As an ameliorative treatment of slavery, then, must "The Grateful Negro" be read as a conservative work? Students should be asked whether Edgeworth intends her reader to see the insurrection as proof that slaves must be carefully, if more humanely, subdued, or whether she suggests that an institution that allows such abuses and thus fosters such violence is intrinsically wrong. If not a radical or revolutionary text, many students argue that Edgeworth's tale departs from conservative treatments of slavery in focusing, like Opie's <em>Adeline Mowbray</em>, on qualities of trust, loyalty and vulnerability in the individual, that at the very least demand that people of conscience recognize the African as a human being.</p>
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<p>An alternative example of an ameliorative treatment of slavery can be found in Thomas Holcroft's <em>Memoirs of Bryan Perdue,</em> which is available in a Garland facsimile edition and in volume IV of Pickering and Chatto's recent <em>The Novels and Selected Plays of Thomas Holcroft.</em> In <em>Bryan Perdue</em> Holcroft attacks the institution of capital punishment as his confessional narrator follows a description of his early fall into vice and his narrow escape from execution for forgery with an account of how he was able to reform himself and devote himself to the benefit of others. In Bryan's case, he focuses his newfound devotion to benevolent acts on West Indian slaves when he leaves England to accept a position as estate-manager of a sugar plantation in Jamaica, an episode that closes the novel in the final nine chapters of its third volume. When he arrives in Jamaica, Bryan quarrels with the white superintendent of the black gangs on the plantation about how the slaves should be managed, insisting that the blacks should be humanized by being taught to reform their actions, a plan that the overseer dismisses as unrealistic. Despite the overseer's doubts Bryan persists in his plan of reform in several stages. First, he wins the slaves' trust and affection by praising their good work and by reasoning with them on behaviors he wishes them to alter. Bryan institutes a reward system for excellence, finds ways to improve the comforts of the slaves' living quarters, and encourages their successes in the cultivation of private gardens set aside as their own property. Unfortunately, Holcroft's attempt to illustrate how one reformed criminal might later prove to benefit the lives of scores of his fellow men and women is undercut for modern readers by the fact that the novel does not take a stand against the institution of slavery, but merely illustrates how the sufferings of slaves might be alleviated.</p>
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<p>Both Edgeworth's and Holcroft's treatments of slavery in these works draw heavily an ameliorative tradition established by Sarah Scott in <em>The History of Sir George Ellison</em> (1766) and by Henry Mackenzie in <em>Julia de Roubign&#233;</em> (1777), and teachers interested in spending more time on ameliorative treatments might consider including readings of these earlier eighteenth-century texts before moving to Edgeworth or Holcroft. Regardless of the reading material, however, when assessing the political nature of ameliorative texts in the classroom, it is important for instructor and students alike to acknowledge the degree to which our own perspectives and values affect our readings of such texts. More open condemnations of slavery would certainly be far more appealing to today's readers. Nevertheless, it is important to ask students to consider the degree to which the complete abolition of slavery may not have seemed realistic or feasible even to committed liberals in the late eighteenth century. I have asked my students to compare this historical moment to the difficulty of stemming the tide of economic forces in the world today when a particular commodity such as tobacco is acknowledged as harmful to consumers, or when the production and consumption of oil, for example, is recognized as harmful to the earth, or as a cause of political friction and war between world powers. Such analogies can lead to animated discussions regarding the extent to which both politics and economics bear on cultural values and mores in every age.</p>
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<p class="descbig"><strong>Changing Stereotypes of the Jew in Britain</strong></p>
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<p>In addition to the racial stereotypes of Africans and Creoles, highly stereotypical portraits of English Jews also appear occasionally in the fiction of the late eighteenth century, commonly drawing on the familiar role of Shakespeare's Shylock as the shrewd but heartless money-lender. Sheila Spector has enumerated three additional stereotypes by which Jews are depicted in British literature, including those based upon Faust; the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus; and Jessica, the assimilated convert to Christianity.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#23">[23]</a><a name="23b" id="23b"> </a> As a racial group, Jews in England were always difficult for the English to categorize easily. Judith Page has explained this difficulty by pointing out that they "were mostly poor but they were also rich, they were foreign-looking but they also simulated British gentility, they spoke English but not always the King's English."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#24">[24]</a><a name="24b" id="24b"> </a></p>
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<p>Perhaps the most fully drawn and the least stereotypical depiction of an English Jew in a novel of the 1790s is to be found in George Walker's <em>Theodore Cyphon; or The Benevolent Jew</em> (1796), another novel available on ECCO, and another that richly rewards the trouble of photocopying for students, if only in excerpted selections.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#25">[25]</a><a name="25b" id="25b"> </a> At the novel's opening the Jewish Shechem Bensadi is rescued by the fugitive hero Theodore while being harassed by a group of thugs in a dark winter snowstorm. Bensadi offers Theodore a room, board, and a job in his counting house, without asking questions about Theodore's past. The young man is shocked by Bensadi's generosity and makes the novel's stance on contemporary Christianity quite clear when he tells Bensadi that "I have felt in a country where ostentatious charity gilds the insides of our churches, and erects magnificent buildings, that from the forlorn wanderer, even justice is withheld."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#26">[26]</a><a name="26b" id="26b"> </a> "Where is the Christian who would have done this?" the narrator asks of Bensadi's generosity (I, 18).</p>
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<p>Although Walker does draw on several contemporary stereotypes concerning the Jews, he mitigates them as his story unfolds. Bensadi is depicted as being extremely penurious and concerned with his investments, for example. Nevertheless, Theodore is astonished to learn from a servant that Bensadi lends freely and without interest to save a poor family from ruin, while simultaneously charging a high rate of interest to a needy peer. In a rare scene in the fiction of the period, Theodore accompanies Bensadi to a meeting of the local Jewish community and witnesses how Bensadi functions as a private bank, supplying the wants of his friends and neighbors and accepting their repayments whenever they are able to pay him back.</p>
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<p>The reviewers of <em>Theodore Cyphon</em> immediately identified Shechem Bensadi as a reinterpretation of Sheva, a character made popular on the London stage two years earlier in Richard Cumberland's 1794 comedy <em>The Jew,</em> which would be a useful text to assign before turning to Walker's novel. Initially Cumberland presents Sheva as the embodiment of the avaricious stereotype of the Jewish money-lender. But Sheva lends literally all of his money to help others and assumes the life of a pauper, explaining that while he does love his money, he loves his fellow man more. Critics are divided on the significance of Cumberland 's play as a social document. For Judith Page, Sheva is merely a reversal of the usurer stereotype, and Cumberland's ostensible good will in presenting a benevolent portrait of the Jew is undercut by his own admission in his later <em>Memoirs</em> that he hoped this original approach to the stereotype would make his play a success.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#27">[27]</a><a name="27b" id="27b"> </a> For Michael Ragussis, however, <em>The Jew</em> plays a far more significant role in British literary history. Ragussis argues that Cumberland subverts the stereotype by imagining the transformation of financial debt into moral debt. For him the play formulates "the basic paradigm for representing the way in which national populations divided by ethnic or religious conflict could be reimagined as whole and integrated beyond prejudice."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#28">[28]</a><a name="28b" id="28b"> </a> The success of Walker's project in <em>Theodore Cyphon</em> is likewise open to discussion, making it and Cumberland's play productive texts for classroom debate, particularly considering the fact that Walker has been universally classed as an anti-Jacobin due to his satiric attack on Godwin and Wollstonecraft in his 1799 <em>The Vagabond.</em></p>
<p><strong><em>&#160;</em></strong></p>
<p class="descbig"><strong>Maria Edgeworth's Change of Heart</strong></p>
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<p>In courses in which I have chosen literary texts that unsettle contemporary assumptions about gender and race in the late eighteenth century, I have found Maria Edgeworth's <em>Belinda</em> (1801) to be a perfect capstone text. Available in an Oxford paperback edited by Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick and as volume II in Pickering's <em>The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth,</em> <em>Belinda</em> offers a wealth of opportunities for discussing issues pertaining to race and racial difference. One of the most fully realized portraits of a Creole in the period, for example, can be found in Belinda's suitor, the Jamaican planter Augustus Vincent. The cheerful Vincent appears to have been inspired by Cumberland's Belcour, although Edgeworth ultimately emphasizes the threatening potential of his vices rather than softening them as Cumberland does. Vincent's typical "sunburnt complexion" is aligned to a personality that is "full of fire and animation."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#29">[29]</a><a name="29b" id="29b"> </a> Despite his charismatic personality, however, Edgeworth explains that Vincent's "social prejudices were such as, in some degree, to supply the place of the power and habit of reasoning, in which he was totally deficient" (170-71). Worst of all, Vincent expressed a "disdain of reason as a moral guide," and "thought, acted, and suffered as a man of feeling" (326-27).</p>
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<p>As in Belcour's case, Vincent's weak reasoning abilities and his high spirits get him into trouble in England. The combination of his na&#239;vet&#233; and his love of pleasure makes him easy prey to high society gamblers who cheat him of his fortune. Ultimately, his high passions make him unsuitable for life among the English and for a marriage to such an ideal of English womanhood as Edgeworth's heroine. Throughout the novel Belinda's mentor Lady Delacour takes great pains to maneuver Belinda away from Vincent and towards her choice of a more appropriate suitor. Susan Greenfield argues that Lady Delacour "represents a form of national and racial border patrol" in "securing Belinda's sexual borders" from Mr. Vincent, and orchestrating her eventual marriage to the thoroughly English Clarence Hervey.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#30">[30]</a><a name="30b" id="30b"> </a> For Greenfield, Lady Delacour's fixation on racial distinctions "may reflect concerns West Indian colonialism generated, as British settlement complicated efforts to separate English citizens from English settlers and their Creole descendants and as the West Indies became potential economic and political liabilities at the end of the eighteenth century."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#31">[31]</a><a name="31b" id="31b"> </a> Students are intrigued to learn that Edgeworth responded to criticism by dramatically altering Belinda's expressions of interest in Mr. Vincent in revisions she made to the novel for a new edition in 1810 and by removing her promise to marry him.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#32">[32]</a><a name="32b" id="32b"> </a> Indeed, a classroom exercise in which students are asked to assess the differences between Belcour and Vincent and to assess Edgeworth's revisions in 1810 will offer them great insight into changing attitudes towards English Creoles and an increased public awareness of the terrible realities of slavery over a span of
four decades.</p>
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<p>Interestingly, <em>Belinda</em> includes an episode in which Belinda and Mr. Vincent read together Day's and Bicknell's melodramatic poem "The Dying Negro," in which a former slave planning to marry a white woman in England takes his own life when he is captured to avoid being returned to America. Edgeworth's use of the poem in this context raises important questions about Vincent's moral character as a West Indian planter. While he praises the poem, his imperfect understanding of it suggests his inability to acknowledge fully the evils of slavery. Greenfield explains that Vincent identifies with the poem from a romantic point of view and not a political one, writing that he "apparently sympathizes with the African speaker of the poem, who, like him, discovers the supposed superiority of European female beauty."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#33">[33]</a><a name="33b" id="33b"> </a> Vincent's blindness to the exploitation of slavery is also evident in his relationship with Juba, the loyal slave he brings with him to England. While Vincent treats Juba with kindness, it is telling, and troubling, that Juba bears the same name as Vincent's loyal dog.</p>
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<p>Juba's role in <em>Belinda</em> adds another layer to unravel in analyzing the treatment of African slaves in the novel of the period. Edgeworth includes an episode in which Juba courts and marries an English girl named Lucy, the daughter of an elderly porter and his wife, who encourage the match despite Lucy's initial fear of Juba's black face. Felicity Nussbaum has pointed out that miscegenation did not appear to trouble the British during this period if the darker partner's social rank was equal to or greater than that of the white partner.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#34">[34]</a><a name="34b" id="34b"> </a> To Lucy's parents, Juba's color is irrelevant; they recognize him as a good potential son-in-law because of his good nature and his industriousness in caning chairs and weaving baskets. Typical of the stereotype of fidelity, Juba's most overwhelming emotion on his wedding day is his gratitude to his master. Rather than singing to his new bride, Juba composes a wedding song in honor of Mr. Vincent, "which he sang to his banjore with the most touching expression of joyful gratitude" (II, 200). Again, students are intrigued to learn that Edgeworth was persuaded by her father and others to rewrite this episode when she prepared her new edition of <em>Belinda</em> in 1810. In her revision Edgeworth replaces Juba as Lucy's groom with an Englishman by the name of James Jackson, although Juba's grateful "banjore" song remains a part of the wedding festivities.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#35">[35]</a><a name="35b" id="35b"> </a> This alteration may support Nussbaum's argument that increasing numbers of freed slaves in England in the early years of the nineteenth century led to more distinctly defined racial categories, as well as to increased anxieties about miscegenation.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#36">[36]</a><a name="36b" id="36b"> </a></p>
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<p><em>Belinda</em> also raises interesting questions concerning the depiction of Jews in England in the early years of the nineteenth century. Edgeworth's depiction of a parsimonious money-lender here, as well as in her 1812 novel <em>The Absentee,</em> resulted in the author's change of heart in the years to follow. In August 1815 Edgeworth received an unsettling letter from a Jewish American reader by the name of Rachel Mordecai, who praised Edgeworth's novels and children's stories but asked how an author "who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#37">[37]</a><a name="37b" id="37b"> </a> "Can it be believed," Mordecai asks, "that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious, and unprincipled?"<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#38">[38]</a><a name="38b" id="38b"> </a> A chagrined Edgeworth was thus inspired to respond to this criticism by publishing a sympathetic treatment of the Jews in England in her 1817 novel <em>Harrington.</em></p>
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<p><em>Harrington</em> chronicles the psychological history of a confessional narrator who develops a psychotic antipathy towards Jews as a result of outlandish tales told to him by a racist and uneducated nurse. As Harrington grows up, his interactions with actual Jewish figures of the day allow him to challenge and eventually overcome his prejudices. Ultimately Harrington becomes friends with the affluent and brilliantly educated Mr. Montenero, a Spanish Jew who has escaped persecution by the Inquisition by fleeing to America, and later to England. Predictably, Harrington falls in love with Montenero's beautiful daughter Berenice. In one particularly climactic episode, Harrington and the Monteneros attempt to protect themselves from a violent mob when the Gordon Riots break out in 1780. During these riots mobs attack and destroy the homes of non-Protestants and foreigners, crying "No Jews, no wooden shoes!" The Monteneros and their home are saved largely through the efforts of a well-meaning orange-woman who runs for help. This woman, who calls herself the widow Levy, voices perhaps the most open-minded attitude towards Jews in the novel. Loyal to the Monteneros for their generous patronage in the past, she calls Montenero "the best Christian any way ever I happened on," and proclaims that "we were all brothers and sisters once.in the time of Adam, sure, and we should help one another in all times."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#39">[39]</a><a name="39b" id="39b"> </a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Throughout <em>Harrington</em> Edgeworth alludes liberally to such earlier literary treatments of the Jew as <em>The Merchant of Venice,</em> Cumberland's <em>The Jew,</em> and Gotthold Lessing's <em>Nathan the Wise</em> (1779), an influential play in which the Jewish merchant Nathan demonstrates to the other characters the futility of racial and religious prejudice. Her most overt reference to Lessing's play can be found in the novel's conclusion when Montenero reveals that Berenice is not a Jew after all. Montenero explains that his late wife was Christian, and that he had allowed Berenice to be raised as a Christian as well. The two had kept this fact a secret in order to test potential suitors for anti-Semitic tendencies. Berenice insists that she will not marry a man who displays any prejudice towards her father's religion, nor will she accept a lover so unfaithful as to be willing to abandon Christianity in order to marry her. Harrington, of course, manages to meet her criteria.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Most students today are highly disappointed by Edgeworth's conclusion, but such disappointment can lead to a very productive class discussion. As in Thelwall's revelation of Seraphina's true English heritage, the tensions inherent to an interracial marriage are dissolved at the novel's close, and so is the opportunity for a final, grand demonstration of the groundlessness of racial prejudice. Rachel Mordecai also expressed disappointment that Berenice was not allowed to stand as a constructive example of a young Jewish woman.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#40">[40]</a><a name="40b" id="40b"> </a> Edgeworth's reason for ending the novel as she does may have stemmed from an attempt to align <em>Harrington</em> with a similar revelation at the conclusion of Lessing's <em>Nathan the Wise</em> that makes a bold statement regarding the arbitrariness of racial and religious distinctions amongst not only Jews and Christians, but Muslims as well. The conclusion of <em>Harrington,</em> however, is admittedly far less successful. In making Berenice a Christian, Edgeworth dramatically weakens her attempt to illustrate that human beings of all races embody the same virtues. Under English tradition, children of mixed Protestant and Catholic marriages were raised with the daughters following the mother's religion and sons following the father's. Thus, the daughters of a Jewish Berenice would themselves presumably be Jewish by English tradition, repeating their mother's social status. Additionally, under Jewish law, any child of a Jewish mother would be by birth a Jew, raising problems for Harrington's male heirs as well despite the counter-system of English primogeniture. A product of her times, Edgeworth can envision an interracial marriage, but she cannot quite make the leap to realize it in 1817.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#41">[41]</a><a name="41b" id="41b"> </a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Like <em>The Daughter of Adoption, Harrington</em> disappoints in the final analysis. Nevertheless, both Thelwall and Edgeworth have at the very least taken a step forward in asking their readers to question common prejudices about racial difference. Moreover, despite its ending, <em>Harrington</em> is perhaps the first British novel wholly intended to work towards dispelling racism. Berenice's final words make Edgeworth's intentions clear. When Mr. Montenero insists that the family's enemies be forgiven, Harrington's father praises his new in-law, echoing words spoken of such characters as Cumberland's Sheva and Walker's Bensadi in saying that "none but a good Christian could do this!" Berenice then answers him with the simple question "and why not a good Jew?" (III, 331).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The texts included in this course syllabus on race in early Romantic-period reformist literature clearly demonstrate a few early hints of an awareness that the novel might be used to foster more humane relations between peoples of varying heritages and backgrounds. Some students may insist, rightly, that few of these novels display an author's complete freedom from long-held cultural stereotypes. Indeed, as Judith Page has written of sympathetic texts on Judaism in the period, even the most progressive of these works "cannot quite contain [their] own representations."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#42">[42]</a><a name="42b" id="42b"> </a> Page is right to state that "revolutions in politics and culture do not necessarily develop evenly."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#43">[43]</a><a name="43b" id="43b"> </a> Nevertheless, the anxieties and shifting attitudes towards race and the disenfranchised that students will readily recognize in these novels give evidence of an awakening social conscience and of the roots of social change that would continue to develop in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In my experience, the troubled, conflicted, and even disturbing treatments of race in the reformist fiction of the revolutionary decade stimulate dynamic classroom discussions of race during this period and afterwards&#8212;discussions with a clear relevance to the ways in which Western culture continues to perceive and respond to race and racial difference today.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<hr height="1" noshade="noshade"/>
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p class="wc"><strong>Primary Works:</strong></p>
<p class="wc">Basker, James, ed. <em>Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660-1810.</em> New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.</p>
<p class="wc">Beaufort, John, L.L.D. [John Thelwall]. <em>The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times.</em> 4 vols. London: R. Phillips, 1801. Available on microfiche in the Corvey Project at Sheffield Hallam University.</p>
<p class="wc">Behn, Aphra. <em>Oroonoko.</em> Ed. Catherine Gallagher. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.</p>
<p class="wc">Cumberland, Richard. <em>The Plays of Richard Cumberland.</em> Ed. Roberta F. S. Borkat. 6 vols. New York: Garland, 1982.</p>
<p class="wc">Earle, William. <em>Obi; or, the History of Three-fingered Jack.</em> Ed. Srinivas Aravamudan. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005.</p>
<p class="wc">Edgeworth, Maria. <em>Belinda.</em> Ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1994.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Harrington.</em> Ed. Susan Manly. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth.</em> Gen. Ed. Marilyn Butler. 12 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999-2003.</p>
<p class="wc">Equiano, Olaudah. <em>The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.</em> Ed. Angelo Costanzo. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004.</p>
<p class="wc">Fawcett, James. <em>Obi, A Serio-Pantomime.</em> Ed. Charles Rzepka. <em>Obi:</em> A Romantic Circles Praxis Volume (August 2002). Available: <a href="/praxis/obi">http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi</a></p>
<p class="wc">Hays, Mary and Amelia Opie. <em>Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Adeline Mowbray; or the Mother and Daughter.</em> Ed. Miriam Wallace. Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing, 2004.</p>
<p class="wc">Holcroft, Thomas. <em>Memoirs of Bryan Perdue.</em> 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805. Repr. New York and London: Garland, 1979.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>The Novels and Selected Plays of Thomas Holcroft.</em> Gen. Ed. W. M. Verhoeven. 5 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007.</p>
<p class="wc">Mackenzie, Anna Maria. <em>Slavery: Or, The Times.</em> 2 vols. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinsons and J. Dennis, 1792. Available on Thomson Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database (ECCO).</p>
<p class="wc"><em>Obi, A Melo-drama in Two Acts.</em> Ed. Charles Rzepka. <em>Obi: A Romantic Circles Praxis Volume</em> (August 2002). Available: <a href="/praxis/obi">http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi</a></p>
<p class="wc">Opie, Amelia. <em>Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter.</em> Ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1999.</p>
<p class="wc">Smith, Charlotte. <em>The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer.</em> 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1800. Repr. Poole, UK and New York: Woodstock Books, 1995.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>The Works of Charlotte Smith.</em> Gen. Ed. Stuart Curran. 14 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005-2007.</p>
<p class="wc">Walker, George. <em>Theodore Cyphon: or, The Benevolent Jew.</em> 3 vols. London: B. Crosby, 1796. Available on Thomson Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database (ECCO).</p>
<p class="wc"><strong>Secondary Works:</strong></p>
<p class="wc">Botkin, Frances R. "Questioning the 'Necessary Order of Things': Maria Edgeworth's 'The Grateful Negro,' Plantation Slavery, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade." <em>Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838.</em> Ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 194-208.</p>
<p class="wc">Bugg, John. "The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano's Public Book Tour." <em>PMLA</em> 121.5 (October 2006):1424-42.</p>
<p class="wc">Butler, Marilyn. <em>Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.</em> Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography.</em> Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830.</em> Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.</p>
<p class="wc">Boulukos, George E. "Maria Edgeworth's 'Grateful Negro' and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery." <em>Eighteenth-Century Life</em> 23.1 (February 1999): 12-29.</p>
<p class="wc">Carey, Brycchan. <em>British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807.</em> Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.</p>
<p class="wc">Cone, Carl B. <em>The English Jacobins: Reformers in Late 18th Century England.</em> New York: Scribners, 1968.</p>
<p class="wc">Dickinson, H.T. <em>British Radicalism and the French Revolution, 1789-1815.</em> Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.</p>
<p class="wc">Eberle, Roxanne. "Amelia Opie's <em>Adeline Mowbray:</em> Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, the Vindication of a Fallen Woman." <em>Studies in the Novel</em> 26.2 (Summer 1994) 121-52.</p>
<p class="wc">Ellis, Markman. <em>The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel.</em> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.</p>
<p class="wc">Endelman, Todd M. <em>The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000.</em> Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>The Jews of Georgian England 1714-1830.</em> Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979. Repr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.</p>
<p class="wc">Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. <em>The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism.</em> New York: Russell and Russell, 1958.</p>
<p class="wc">Ferguson, Moira. <em>Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834.</em> London and New York: Routledge, 1992.</p>
<p class="wc">Greenfield, Susan C. "'Abroad and at Home': Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth's <em>Belinda."</em> <em>PMLA</em> 112.2 (March 1997): 214-28.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen.</em> Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002.</p>
<p class="wc">Grenby, M. O. "Politicised Fiction in Britain 1790-1810: An Annotated Checklist." <em>The European English Messenger</em> 9.2 (Autumn 2000): 47-53.</p>
<p class="wc">Harvey, Alison. "West Indian Obeah and English 'Obee': Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth's <em>Belinda.</em>" <em>New Essays on Maria Edgeworth.</em> Ed. Julie Nash. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. 1-29.</p>
<p class="wc">Hoad, Neville. "Maria Edgeworth's <em>Harrington:</em> The Price of Sympathetic Representation." <em>British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature.</em> Ed. Sheila A. Spector. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 121-38.</p>
<p class="wc">Howard, Carol. "' The Story of the Pineapple': Sentimental Abolitionism and Moral Motherhood in Amelia Opie's <em>Adeline Mowbray.</em>" <em>Studies in the Novel</em> 30.3 (Fall 1998): 355-76.</p>
<p class="wc">Kelly, Gary. "Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology." <em>ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature</em> 12.4 (Oct 1981): 3-24.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "Discharging Debts: The Moral Economy of Amelia Opie's Fiction." <em>The Wordsworth Circle</em> 11 (1980): 198-203.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805.</em> Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827.</em> Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.</p>
<p class="wc">Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. "'Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject': West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth's <em>Belinda.</em>" <em>Eighteenth-Century Fiction</em> 5.4 (July 1993): 331-48.</p>
<p class="wc">Lee, Debbie. <em>Slavery and the Romantic Imagination.</em> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.</p>
<p class="wc">McCann, Andrew. "Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: The Colonial Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth's <em>Belinda.</em>" <em>Novel</em> 30.1 (Fall 1996): 56-77.</p>
<p class="wc">Mellor, Anne K. "'Am I Not a Woman, and a Sister?': Slavery, Romanticism, and Gender." <em>Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture: 1780-1834.</em> Ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 311-29.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "English Women Writers and the French Revolution." <em>Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution.</em> Ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 255-72.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780-1830.</em> Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000.</p>
<p class="wc">Mellor, Anne K. and Richard E. Matlak. <em>British Literature 1780-1830.</em> New York: Heinle, 1995.</p>
<p class="wc">Nussbaum, Felicity A. <em>The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century.</em> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "Women and Race: 'A Difference of Complexion.'" <em>Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800.</em> Ed. Vivien Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 69-88.</p>
<p class="wc">Page, Judith W. <em>Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture.</em> Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "Maria Edgeworth's <em>Harrington:</em> From Shylock to Shadowy Peddlers." <em>The Wordsworth Circle</em> 32:1 (Winter 2001): 9-13.</p>
<p class="wc">Perera, Suvendrini. <em>Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens.</em> New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.</p>
<p class="wc">Ragussis, Michael. <em>Figures of Conversion:</em> "<em>The Jewish Question</em>" <em>&amp; English National Identity.</em> Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "Jews and Other 'Outlandish Englishmen': Ethnic Performance and the Invention of British Identity under the Georges." <em>Critical Inquiry</em> 26:4 (Summer 2000): 773-97.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form: <em>Harrington</em> and the Novel of Jewish Identity." <em>Critical Inquiry</em> 16.1 (Autumn 1989): 113-43.</p>
<p class="wc">Richardson, Alan. "Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797-1807." <em>Studies in Romanticism</em> 32:1 (Spring 1993):3-28.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "Slavery and Romantic Writing." <em>A Companion to Romanticism.</em> Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 460-69.</p>
<p class="wc">Rosenberg, Edgar. <em>From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction.</em> Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960.</p>
<p class="wc">Rzepka, Charles, ed. <em>Obi:</em> A Romantic Circles Praxis Volume (August 2002). <a href="/praxis/obi">http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi.</a></p>
<p class="wc">Scrivener, Michael. <em>Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing.</em> University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.</p>
<p class="wc">Shyllon, Folarin. <em>Black People in Britain 1555-1833.</em> London: Published for the Institute of Race Relations, London, by Oxford University Press, 1977.</p>
<p class="wc">Shyllon, F. O. <em>Black Slaves in Britain.</em> London and New York: Published for the Institute of Race Relations, London, by Oxford University Press, 1974.</p>
<p class="wc">Spector, Sheila A., ed. <em>The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture.</em> Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "The <em>Other's Other:</em> The Function of the Jew in Maria Edgeworth's Fiction." <em>European Romantic Review</em> 10.3 (Summer 1999): 307-40.</p>
<p class="wc">Sussman, Charlotte. <em>Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833.</em> Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.</p>
<p class="wc">Sypher, Wylie. "The African Prince in London." <em>Journal of the History of Ideas</em> 2.2 (April 1941):237-47.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century.</em> Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942; Repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1969.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "The West-Indian as a 'Character' in the Eighteenth Century." <em>Studies in Philology</em> 36 (1939): 503-20.</p>
<p class="wc">Ty, Eleanor. <em>Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812.</em> Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.</p>
<p class="wc">Wheeler, Roxann. <em>The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture.</em> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.</p>
<p class="wc">Wolfe, Stephen F. "'Are Such Things Done on Albion's Shore?' The Discourses of Slavery in the Rhetoric of English Jacobin Writers." <em>Nordlit</em> 6 (1999):161-73.</p>
<p class="wc">---. "'The Bloody Writing is for ever torn': Inscribing Slavery in the 1790s." <em>Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues 1775-1815.</em> Ed. W. M. Verhoeven and Beth Dolan Kautz. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. 169-90.</p>
<p class="wc">Wright, Eamon. <em>British Women Writers and Race, 1788-1818: Narrations of Modernity.</em> Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" height="1"/>
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#1b">[1]</a><a name="1" id="1"> </a> See Carl B. Cone, <em>The English Jacobins,</em> iii. For a comprehensive definition of the origin and implications of the term "Jacobin" and "Jacobinism" in the 1790s, see H. T. Dickinson, <em>British Radicalism and the French Revolution,</em> 1-24; and Michael Scrivener, <em>Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing,</em> 21-30.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#2b">[2]</a><a name="2" id="2"> </a> Cone, <em>The English Jacobins,</em> v.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#3b">[3]</a><a name="3" id="3"> </a> Aphra Behn, <em>Oroonoko,</em> ed. Catherine Gallagher (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 3.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#4b">[4]</a><a name="4" id="4"> </a> See the appended syllabus for other examples of abolitionist poetry that can be used effectively in the undergraduate classroom. Teachers may also find it helpful to consult James Basker's <em>Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660-1810.</em></p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#5b">[5]</a><a name="5" id="5"> </a> See John Bugg's essay on Equiano's book tour.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#6b">[6]</a><a name="6" id="6"> </a> Constanzo provides a helpful introduction to this controversy in the Introduction to his edition of the <em>Interesting Narrative,</em> 29-30.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#7b">[7]</a><a name="7" id="7"> </a> See Charles Rzepka's Romantic Circles Praxis Series volume on <em>Obi.</em></p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#8b">[8]</a><a name="8" id="8"> </a> See Rzepka, Introduction to <em>Obi,</em> Romantic Circles Praxis Series, para. 6.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#9b">[9]</a><a name="9" id="9"> </a> For thorough treatments of the ways in which the rhetoric of sensibility was used across a wide spectrum of genres in the abolitionist debate in late eighteenth-century Britain, see Markman Ellis, <em>The Politics of Sensibility</em> and Brycchan Carey, <em>British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility.</em></p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#10b">[10]</a><a name="10" id="10"> </a> For a catalogue of such accounts see Wylie Sypher, "The African Prince in London" and Folarin Shyllon, <em>Black People in Britain,</em> 45-66.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#11b">[11]</a><a name="11" id="11"> </a> For accounts of this incident see <em>The Gentleman's Magazine</em> XIX (1749):89-90, and <em>The London Magazine</em> XVIII (1749): 94; cited by Folarin Shyllon, <em>Black People in Britain,</em> 46. See also Nussbaum, <em>The Limits of the Human,</em> 189-90.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#12b">[12]</a><a name="12" id="12"> </a> Teachers who are interested in providing students with excerpts from <em>Slavery</em> might do well to choose to work with merely the first four sections of the novel's first volume, which include three letters between Adolphus's father and his English guardian, and his guardian's journal of Adolphus's reactions while traveling to England via Jamaica (vol. I, 1-72). In addition, Adolphus's disapproval of English social conventions can be found in Letter 14, "To Miss St Leger from Adolphus," vol. I, 143-53. Adolphus attends a performance of <em>Oroonoko</em> in vol. I, 190.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#13b">[13]</a><a name="13" id="13"> </a> For analysis of this episode, see Anne Mellor "Am I Not a Woman, and a Sister?," 322-23, and <em>Mothers of the Nation,</em> 105; and Susan Greenfield, <em>Mothering Daughters,</em> 134-44.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#14b">[14]</a><a name="14" id="14"> </a> "'The Story of the Pineapple': Sentimental Abolitionism and Moral Motherhood in Amelia Opie's <em>Adeline Mowbray,</em>" 356.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#15b">[15]</a><a name="15" id="15"> </a> "Amelia Opie's <em>Adeline Mowbray:</em> Diverting the Libertine Gaze," 142.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#16b">[16]</a><a name="16" id="16"> </a> Garland edition, ed. Borkat, I, 40.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#17b">[17]</a><a name="17" id="17"> </a> <em>The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer,</em> 3 vols. (London: Sampson Low, 1800; Repr. Poole, England and New York: Woodstock Books, 1995), II, 70.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#18b">[18]</a><a name="18" id="18"> </a> <em>The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times.</em> 4 vols. (London: R. Phillips, 1801), I, 268-69.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#19b">[19]</a><a name="19" id="19"> </a> <em>Seditious Allegories,</em> 244.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#20b">[20]</a><a name="20" id="20"> </a> For teachers interested in excerpting from Thelwall's novel, the passages in which Henry travels to St Domingo and experiences Creole life are found in vol. I, book iii, chapters 1-3, with Seraphina's history comprising chapter 3. Henry's rescue of Seraphina during a slave insurrection is described in detail in vol. II, book iv, chapter 1.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#21b">[21]</a><a name="21" id="21"> </a> "The Grateful Negro," <em>Popular Tales,</em> Pickering edition, XII, 59.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#22b">[22]</a><a name="22" id="22"> </a> See Introductory Note, "The Grateful Negro," Pickering text, XII, x; and essays by Moira Ferguson, Frances R. Botkin, and George E. Boulukos.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#23b">[23]</a><a name="23" id="23"> </a> "The <em>Other's Other,</em>" 310. Spector's categories build on the work of Edgar Rosenberg in <em>From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction</em> (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 206-33. See also Endelman, <em>The Jews of Britain,</em> 41-77.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#24b">[24]</a><a name="24" id="24"> </a> <em>Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture,</em> 3-4.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#25b">[25]</a><a name="25" id="25"> </a> Teachers wishing to excerpt selections from <em>Theodore Cyphon</em> may find adequate materials for reading and classroom discussion in Walker's Preface, and in vol. I, chapters 1-6.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#26b">[26]</a><em><a name="26" id="26"> </a> Theodore Cyphon: or, The Benevolent Jew.</em> 3 vols. (London: B. Crosby, 1796) I, 12-13.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#27b">[27]</a><em><a name="27" id="27"> </a> Imperfect Sympathies,</em> 34.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#28b">[28]</a><a name="28" id="28"> </a> "Jews and Other 'Outlandish Englishmen,'" 791-92.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#29b">[29]</a><a name="29" id="29"> </a> <em>Belinda,</em> Pickering edition, II, 170.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#30b">[30]</a><a name="30" id="30"> </a> "Abroad and at Home," 222; see also Kathryn Kirkpatrick, "'Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject,'" 331-48; and Alison Harvey, "West Indian Obeah and English 'Obee,'" 1-29.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#31b">[31]</a><a name="31" id="31"> </a> "Abroad and at Home," 216.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#32b">[32]</a><a name="32" id="32"> </a> See Marilyn Butler, <em>Maria Edgeworth,</em> 494-95.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#33b">[33]</a><a name="33" id="33"> </a> "Abroad and at Home," 220.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#34b">[34]</a><em><a name="34" id="34"> </a> The Limits of the Human,</em> 242.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#351b">[35]</a><a name="35" id="35"> </a> See Marilyn Butler, <em>Maria Edgeworth,</em> 494-95; Suvendrini Perera, <em>Reaches of Empire,</em> 15-34; and Kathryn Kirkpatrick "'Gentlemen Have Horrors,'" 331-48.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#36b">[36]</a><em><a name="36" id="36"> </a> The Limits of the Human,</em> 19.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#37b">[37]</a><a name="37" id="37"> </a> Rachel Mordecai, Letter to Maria Edgeworth, 7 August 1815, published in <em>Harrington,</em> ed. Manly, 298.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#38b">[38]</a><a name="38" id="38"> </a> <em>Harrington,</em> ed. Manly, 298.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#39b">[39]</a><a name="39" id="39"> </a> <em>Harrington,</em> Pickering edition, ed. Marilyn Butler and Susan Manly, III, 286.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#40b">[40]</a><a name="40" id="40"> </a> See her letter to Edgeworth dated 28 October 1817; <em>Harrington,</em> ed. Manly, 301.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#41b">[41]</a><a name="41" id="41"> </a> See Sheila Spector, "The <em>Other's Other,"</em> 332; Judith Page "Maria Edgeworth's <em>Harrington,</em>" 12-13, and <em>Imperfect Sympathies,</em> 156-58; and Michael Ragussis, "Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form," 132-43, and <em>Figures of Conversion,</em> 77-88.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#42b">[42]</a><a name="42" id="42"> </a> <em>Imperfect Sympathies,</em> 3.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/markley.html#43b">[43]</a><a name="43" id="43"> </a> <em>Imperfect Sympathies,</em> 3.</p></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31530">Pedagogies</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/index.html">Novel Prospects: Teaching Romantic-Era Fiction</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/markley-aa">Markley, A.A.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1667" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">slavery</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1689" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">abolition</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3561" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Race</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3562" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Racial Difference</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3563" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Africans</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3564" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jews</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3565" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Reformist Fiction</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3566" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jacobin Novel</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3567" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Novel of the 1790s</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/mary-wollstonecraft" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Wollstonecraft</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/thomas-holcroft" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Holcroft</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jack-mansong" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-wilberforce" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Wilberforce</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-thelwall" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Thelwall</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/charlotte-smith" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charlotte Smith</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/adeline-mowbray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Adeline Mowbray</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-cowper" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Cowper</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/eliza-fenwick" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eliza Fenwick</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/caleb-williams" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caleb Williams</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/lucius-moroon" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lucius Moroon</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/richard-cumberland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Cumberland</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/mary-prince" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Prince</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-godwin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Godwin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-earle-jr" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Earle , Jr.</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/ottobah-cugoano" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ottobah Cugoano</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/anna-maria-mackenzie" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anna Maria Mackenzie</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/richard-e-matlak" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard E. Matlak</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/henry-montfort" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Henry Montfort</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/seraphina" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Seraphina</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/thomas-clarkson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Clarkson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/helen-maria-williams" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Helen Maria Williams</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/thomas-paine" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Paine</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/roxanne-eberle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Roxanne Eberle</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-murray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Murray</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/mary-hayes" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Hayes</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/angelo-costanzo" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Angelo Costanzo</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/olaudah-equiano" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Olaudah Equiano</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/maria-lovell-edgeworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Maria Lovell Edgeworth</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/henry-mackenzie" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Henry Mackenzie</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/james-fawcett" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Fawcett</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/robert-bage" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert Bage</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/elizabeth-inchbald" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Elizabeth Inchbald</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/thomas-southerne" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Southerne</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/harrington-edgeworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Harrington Edgeworth</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/london" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">London</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/south-carolina" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">South Carolina</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/mississippi" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mississippi</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/france" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">France</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/the-netherlands" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Netherlands</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/jamaica" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jamaica</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/spain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Spain</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/england" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">England</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-region-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Region:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/region/west-africa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">West Africa</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/region/caribbean" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caribbean</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/region/west-indies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">West Indies</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/africa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Africa</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-naturalfeature-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NaturalFeature:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/indies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Indies</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:07:53 +0000rc-admin28916 at http://www.rc.umd.eduObihttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi/index.html
<div class="field field-name-field-index-banner field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-index-banner" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/styles/index_banner/public/obi_banner%5B1%5D.jpg?itok=ZlPhVt6R" width="640" height="213" alt="Obi, Edited by Charles Rzepka" title="Obi, Edited by Charles Rzepka" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="IndexContent">
<h2 class="TOC">Table of Contents</h2>
<ul id="TOCContent">
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/about.html">About this Volume</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html">"Introduction: <i>Obi</i>, Aldridge and Abolition"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Charles Rzepka, Boston University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#rzepka">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/rzepka.html">"<i>Obi</i> Now"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Charles Rzepka, Boston University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#rzepka">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/rzepka.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html">"Theatrical Forms, Ideological Conflicts, and the Staging of <i>Obi</i>"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Jeffrey N. Cox, University of Colorado at Boulder</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#cox">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/hoskins/hoskins.html">"Savage Boundaries: Reading Samuel Arnold's Score"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Robert Hoskins, Massey University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#hoskins">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/hoskins/hoskins.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html">"<i>Obi</i> in New York: Aldridge and the African Grove "</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Peter Buckley, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#buckley">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/lee/lee.html">"Grave Dirt, Dried Toads, and the Blood of a Black Cat:
How Aldridge Worked His Charms"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Debbie Lee, Washington State University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#lee">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/lee/lee.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/hogle/hogle.html">"Directing <i>Obi</i> in 2000"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#hogle">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/hogle/hogle.html">Essay</a></li>
</ul>
<h2 class="TOC">Supplemental Materials</h2>
<ul id="TOCContent">
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/obi_pantomime_act1.html"><i>Obi</i> Pantomime</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/obi_melodrama_act1.html"><i>Obi</i> Melodrama</a>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/videos.html">Videos of the Pantomime and Melodrama Productions</a></li></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/program1.html">Program for Boston University Production</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/program2.html">Program for NASSR Conference Production</a></li>
</ul>
</div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2002-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2002</span></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-edited-by field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Edited By:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:EDT"><a href="/person/rzepka-charles-j">Rzepka, Charles J.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-technical-editor field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Resource Technical Editor:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/byrne-joseph">Byrne, Joseph</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1332" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Three-fingered Jack</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1672" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1665" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ira Aldridge</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1688" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Romantic theater</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1689" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">abolition</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1669" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">melodrama</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1668" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">pantomime</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1685" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Obeah</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1667" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">slavery</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1690" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">African-American theater</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1677" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Samuel Arnold</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1691" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Earle</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1692" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Benjamin Moseley</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1693" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Murray</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1661" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles Mathews</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-52 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Resource (Taxonomy):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/praxis-series/obi" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Obi</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:21:22 +0000rc-admin22676 at http://www.rc.umd.eduSlavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period. Eds. Peter Kitson and Debbie Leehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/slavery-abolition-and-emancipation-writings-british-romantic-period-eds-peter-kitson
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="caption" class="alignleft" width="239"><em>Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period</em>. 8 volumes. General Editors, Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee. London: Pickering &amp; Chatto Publishers, 1999. 3,200pp (chiefly facsimile). £595.00/$950.00 (Hdbk; ISBN: 1-851-96513-0).</div>
<h3>Reviewed by<br />
Charlotte Sussman<br />
University of Colorado at Boulder</h3>
<p>Few political movements can have spent so much energy worrying about the relationship between literature and other kinds of materials than the British antislavery movement, or invested so much faith in their forceful interaction. In the course of "Slavery. A Poem" (1788), for example, Hannah More undertakes an investigation of the power of poetry alongside her indictment of British slavery. She calls upon not only "Liberty" and "Freedom," for inspiration, but also upon the author of the dramatic version of <em>Oroonoko,</em> Aphra Behn's narrative of slave rebellion: "O, plaintive Southerne! whose impassion'd strain / So oft had wak'd my languid Muse in vain! / Now, when congenial themes her cares engage, / She burns to emulate thy glowing page[.]" More thus implies that her poem's political efficacy will spring from its ability to carry the emotional impact of a play. A few lines later, however, she rejects the affect of "bright invention": "For no fictitious ills these numbers flow, / But living anguish, and substantial woe; / No individual griefs my bosom melt, / For million feel what Oroonoko felt." Even here, though, it seems as if the millions of actual slaves merely mimic the feelings of the fictional hero. The poem suggests that an understanding of "real" suffering depends on the powers of representation, even as its narrator insists on the primacy of experience: "Rhetoric or verse may point the feeling line, / They do not whet sensation but define." In this way, More, along with many in the antislavery movement, implicitly celebrates print culture, and the inherent value of the written record. Of abolition, she says "What page of human annals can record / A deed so bright as human rights restor'd? / O may that god-like deed, that shining page, / Redeem OUR fame, and consecrate OUR age!"</p>
<p>It is just this kind of written record that we now have in <em>Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation</em>. "Slavery. A Poem" reminds us that, when More wrote, the distinction between "literature" and other kinds of printed material was not nearly as sharply drawn as it is today. These volumes will allow twentieth-century readers to re-think that continuum of material for themselves. The collection is neatly divided into three volumes covering literature (verse, drama, fiction), four covering extra-literary material (theories of race, the history of medicine, the abolition debate, and the emancipation debate) and one devoted to the works of Black writers. Each volume begins with a contextualizing introduction, and then includes a number of documents in facsimile. Ranging from pieces that are now canonical, such as Blake's "Little Black Boy," to those that were widely-read in their own time, such as William Fox's pamphlet "on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum" and Thomas Clarkson's "Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species," the collection also includes texts initially intended for more specialized audiences, like "Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves." At least one narrative crosses discursive boundaries; the story of "Obi" or "Three-Fingered Jack" appears both as a novel, and as a play (the story is originally drawn from "life," and recorded in Benjamin Mosely's <em>Treatise on Sugar</em>). The reader is free to make what connections he or she will between these discourses, or to conclude, as several of the volume editors remind us, that capitalist economics and the armed rebellion of slaves themselves may have had more of an impact on the history of slavery than any piece of print. While this collection doesn't strive to put forward any one answer to the vexed question of why slavery was abolished in the British colonies when it was, it will introduce readers to enough of the key texts from the period to make the problem come alive in all its complexity.</p>
<p>Fictional images of British slavery from this era survive primarily in "low-culture" formspoems published in periodicals, theatrical pantomimes, sentimental tales. The editors of the literary volumesSrinivas Aravamudan, Jeffrey Cox, and Alan Richardsondo an excellent job of explaining the cultural contexts of those genres, and the possibilities and limits they may have imposed on representations of slave culture. Cox, for example, considers the flexibility allowed by even the most popular and schematic of forms when discussing Isaac Bickerstaff's comic-opera afterpiece, <em>The Padlock</em>. </p>
<blockquote><p>
While <em>The Padlock</em>'s popularity in slave-holding colonies suggests that the comic portrayal of the enslaved Mungo reassured British West Indians about their treatment of African slaves, <em>The Padlock</em> could also be played against slavery, with Mungothe first blackface comic figure on the London stage to use something approaching an accurate dialectas a voice of resistance. (5: xv)
</p></blockquote>
<p>On occasion, Mungo concluded the epilogue by stating "For, though no Briton, Mungo isa man," "a way of reading Mungo that enabled the great black actor Ira Aldridge to make Mungo . . . one of his triumphant roles" (5: xv). Thus, representations of slavery could have political effects well beyond their explicit intentions. Aravamudan uncovers a similar kind of paradoxical multivalency in fictional representations of slavery:</p>
<blockquote><p>
With respect to political fiction, we are faced with an ideological Hobson's choice, in that the reformist (but "pro-slavery") interventions of the period . . . are more refreshingly loco-specific even though ideologically objectionable from a post-slavery perspective, whereas the anti-slavery fictions that include portraits of slaves and freedmen in metropolitan contexts are frequently subjected to sentimentalist distortions. (6: xviii)
</p></blockquote>
<p>Oddly, then, one has to turn pro-slavery accounts to understand the material realities of plantation lifea move one has to replicate when reading the non-literary material. Despite the value antislavery activists like More seem to put on the collection of empirical facts about slavery, few abolitionists (aside from Clarkson) went beyond sentimental tableaux in their representation of that world.</p>
<p>I wonder, however, about the general editors', particularly Kitson's, desire to assimilate this material so forcefully into the pre-existing category of "The British Romantic Period" (see 1: xviii; 2: ix). While it's certainly clear that a greater understanding of the history of British slavery will benefit the study of canonical British Romanticism, it's less clear what an understanding of Romanticism can do for the study of the history of British slavery. True, many of the major events in that history took place during what we understand as the Romantic period: the abolition of the trade in 1807, the emancipation of the slaves in the Caribbean in 1833. But other events did not: the chartering of the Royal African Company in 1660; the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht, granting England the monopoly rights to the slave trade, in 1713; and the intense involvement of British abolitionists in the American struggle against slavery during the nineteenth century. An understanding of the long histories of capitalism, science, and religion is as vital to understanding British slavery as the "Romantic period" issues of the revolution and the rights of man. I bring this up because such a circumscribed vision of the period 17801830 arguably continues the Balkanization of literary studies into "periods." It is gratifying to see Wylie Sypher's ground-breaking work, <em>Guinea's Captive Kings</em> (published in 1942 and long out of print) acknowledged by almost every editor. Yet, while work on representations of slavery from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Laura Brown, Markman Ellis, Margaret Ferguson and Kim Hall is cited in one or the other introductions to individual volumes, work by scholars such as Felicity Nussbaum, Carol Barash and Elizabeth Bohls is never mentioned. Only Brown, among these influential critics, is cited by Kitson in the general introduction. More important than my quibbling over citations, however, is the way the tightness of focus here tends to reify the "specialness" of the same old Romantic Period, while at the same time providing a plethora of material that should lead us to reconsider not only the characteristics of that era, but the whole issue of periodization. Indeed, most of the individual volumes contain texts from far outside that chronological rubric; it seems important that this historical breadth be acknowledged in discussion of the organizing framework.</p>
<p>I should confess, finally, that this collection makes me feel like one of those proverbial schoolchildren who had to walk through snow to the unheated one-room schoolhouse. Not so long ago, when I started researching the more ephemeral material surrounding the antislavery movementpamphlets, uncanonized poems and novels, memoirsmuch of what I found, if it existed at all outside the British Library, was stored in unsorted boxes, in small, often incompletely cataloged collections (no computer databases). It was nothing you would come across unless you were doing a highly specialized research project. Now, thanks to Pickering &amp; Chatto, and the editors of these volumes, much of that material will be easily accessible to a broad audience (in libraries, anyway, these volumes being too expensive for individual buyers). Surely, a new era of scholarship will now beginwhat once was specialized knowledge may now become required reading. Indeed, the volumes seem almost to fulfill Hannah More's vision, carrying out the aims of the abolitionists themselves to disseminate the knowledge of British slavery as widely as possible.</p>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-volume-and-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Volume and Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/reviews-blog-categories/vol-4-no-1" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vol. 4 No. 1</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/sussman-charlotte">Sussman, Charlotte</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Reviews</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/peter-j-kitson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peter J. Kitson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1337" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Debbie Lee</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1667" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">slavery</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3561" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Race</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1689" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">abolition</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/emancipation" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">emancipation</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/charlotte-sussman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charlotte Sussman</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/oroonoko" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Oroonoko</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/charlotte-sussman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charlotte Sussman</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/hannah-more" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hannah More</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/thomas-clarkson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Clarkson</a></li></ul></section>Thu, 24 Aug 2000 19:31:26 +0000Jeffrey N. Cox47705 at http://www.rc.umd.edu